> it's also fairly convenient to glance at an email message and immediately be able to infer with reasonable confidence what level of expertise to expect from t

> it's also fairly convenient to glance at an email message and immediately be able to infer with reasonable confidence what level of expertise to expect from the stranger on the other end You are confusing "level of expertise" with "number of years on the Internet". Knowing the Internet seniority of the person you are responding to is an unremarkable data point in all but arcane conversations about the Internet itself (and even then, it's still of dubious value). I used to be on your side (old Usenet dog here) but these days, I am convinced that top posting is actually a more productive way of communicating for a bunch of reasons: - Most of the time, you know the context of the conversation so reading the new content at the top of the message saves you time. - Most old Internet dogs suck at quoting either because they've never learned how to summarize or because they are cutting out the parts of the message they don't want you to see (either intentionally or accidentally). Some will cut too much text, other will quote twenty lines to add one, but either way, you end up visually hunting the new content interleaved with several levels of previous quoting, which is tiresome and entirely avoided by top posting.