[X-Newbies] Top posing in mail?

[Steven Rogers]

On May 19, 2005, at 6:36 AM, B.ru c-e •K1u-tch-k0 wrote:

> In my experience, business email ends to reply to longer writings  
> and more often is not distributed on a mailing list (where bottom  
> posting would convey the logical sequence of events to people who  
> didn't write the originating email). More likely business email is  
> a reply to a person or a group of people, all of whom were aware of  
> the contents of the original
> email. In this case, it is not so terrible to show the reply first  
> -- this way, people know what the original email was, and they are  
> more interested in seeing the reply. . . .

Top-posting is always confusing if there's going to be more than one  
or two replies. It really has nothing to do with mailing lists - its  
just as confusing when something is going around the office for  
multiple comments. I've had plenty of experience in the "business"  
world, and the reason people do it that way is because that's the  
default program behavior.  In cases where I've been in that sort of  
dialog and gotten the participants to reply at the bottom, most  
people agree that the product is much easier to read. The whole  
objection is 1) the program top-posts and 2) I don't want to scroll,  
I just want to immediately see the text that I'm interested in at  
that moment.

Generally, the more time people spend writing "backwards" replies,  
the more difficult they find it to change later. That's why it so  
disappointing that mail has joined the ranks of the backwards-reply  
programs. Just as an aside, I also find it really annoying that the  
mailboxes can now only be on the left. Taking away user preferences  
and just generally horking up the interface seems to be the design  
guideline for the latest version of Mail.

SR