One of the many downsides of "top posting" that I didn't see mentioned is when a given email including quotes is taken as the history of the email thread up to

One of the many downsides of "top posting" that I didn't see mentioned is when a given email including quotes is taken as the history of the email thread up to that point, but it's missing emails (because of concurrency with possibly multiple replies going on at once, and because of cherry-picking or randomly-picking which subtree to respond to). Even in a back-and-forth between 2 people, there are some people who'll reply a second time to the same email, not to replace their earlier response, but to add more information. (Aside: Also, it seems to be rare for people forwarded a top-posted thread context to actually read it, unless they're looking to assign blame.) In every company, I end up having to reconstruct context for someone, or do archaeology on some interaction, and the top-quoting both helps and hurts. Downsides of lazy top-posting for these purposes include having to break out all those messages, and fill in the gaps from maybe multiple copies at different points. Upsides include when, say, a single email is the only record, and the fact that a bunch of people top-posted means you have more raw information, in the quotes, than if that single email was in a history of people doing proper Netiquette with minimal quoting of the parts they were responding to. There are a whole bunch of reasons and implications for how things are done in corporate practice, and IME most of them come down to one of: poor tools, poor use of the tools (including by "digital natives"), and corporate misalignment + politics.