plaintext email?

Tue Jan 15 18:36:38 UTC 2019

Re: Top Posting

To me it depends on whether there's any chance the reader won't know
what precisely you're responding to in which case in-line is
warranted.

I don't have any quoted text in this msg (is that top posting?), is
anyone lost?

THE REAL REASON for my responding at all is because there are people
who lurk and sometimes manage lists who will react angrily, often in
private email (cowards! :-) ), to a top-post as if you violated some
inarguable rule and you maybe should be banned or at the very least
are very rude, similar in tone to if you'd spammed the list or
whatever.

I just thought I'd point out it's just a formatting opinion, a
judgement call by whoever is responding, and nothing more, it's not
some rule everyone accepts so lose the self-righteous tone.

If anything I suspect it might have to do with the MUA one uses.

Maybe, at the very least, accept that the person who top-posted is
looking at a very different layout than you are, one where that
top-post looks just fine?

I use Emacs/VM for email. It's quite good at, for example, splitting
the screen so I can look ahead (or behind) in the message if I've lost
track of some context, or even opening multiple related msgs (even if
already filed) simultaneously to go back and review what's been said
already, or forward even to see if one is about to say something which
has already been adequately addressed.

It's probably quite a bit different than the one-way upside-down
(date-wise) scrolling on some vendor-supplied smartphone app.

I've used them when I've had nothing else and I haven't a clue how one
can do much else than essentially "more" thru the latest, silo'd, 10^9
spams interspersed with the occasional bit of ham 20 lines at a time
so I guess I can understand why some become desperate and angry to get
others to format their email for their convenience.

Maybe your problem isn't the top-posting but your lousy MUA?

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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