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Most mail clients seem to do this (maybe not so many web-based ones). Gmail has the problem of creating Tofu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-posting#Top-pos

• untog 14y ago
  Does anyone care about top posting any more? I feel like I haven't heard the term since my newsgroup days.
  • w1ntermute 14y ago
    I bottom-post all the time when emailing certain (tech-savvy) individuals. Makes it much easier to reply point-by-point. However, bottom-posting's value is lost on the vast majority of people, so I don't bother unless it's someone I know will appreciate it.
    • leephillips 14y ago
      I can't be sure, but I suspect that what you are calling top-posting is the opposite. Top-posting refers to the sloppy practice of just pasting your reply ("posting") on "top" of the entire quoted email, rather than quoting selectively and replying point-by-point, as you're supposed to do.
      • w1ntermute 14y ago
        Woops, my bad. I meant to write "bottom-posting".
    • deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  • leephillips 14y ago
    If by "care about" you mean "annoyed by it and treat it as a sign that I am corresponding with a techno-illiterate who is, in addition, at least somewhat slovenly in regard to his correspondence," then, yes.
  • alayne 14y ago
    My work email is usually HTML which is clumsy to reformat with the precision I had formatting simple text using Emacs+Gnus on Usenet. Normally I'd rather have the transcript of successive emails anyway.
  • jlees 14y ago
    On USENET, especially without a threaded client, top-posting was a sin because it often removed valuable context - or forced the reader to scroll down to see the context then back up to see the reply. It also made for poor arguments in long threads where a poster would address multiple points at once rather than inline, point-by-point. Similarly, when using non-threaded email clients the same problem exists. The bottom of the post becomes a mishmash of quotes and arrows (ah, "> > > > > > > > > > >", how we miss you) and almost impossible to figure out what the original poster was trying to say. With threading, and especially Gmail's aggregate view of threads, top posting is far less of an issue. If everyone is using Gmail (e.g. Apps set up within a company), there's very little reason to reply inline for shorter messages, and more reason (phone consumption) to top-post. For longer discussions, though, it still helps to address points individually inline rather than attempt to pull them out on top. Even within an organisation entirely using Gmail, there are still people who are sticklers for bottom-posting and seethe when they see top-posting. I used to be one of those people on USENET, but for the reasons above, I've changed my stance considerably.
  • bcoates 14y ago
    The thing that's made it easiest for me to embrace the top-posting worldview is to remove all redundant fluff from e-mails, including the quote when not forwarding. That said, it looks like the world is converging around the idea that down maps to past (inboxes, browser history, Twitter, Facebook timeline). I wonder if anyone has made a top-posting-style shell? It'd be like using less as a shell...