Top Post or Bottom Post?
One of friends asked me why I bottom-post, i.e. while replying to emails why I put my text at the end of the email. I started out as a top-poster back in late 90s, but got a bump when I came to know that top-posting is a bad idea, and there are reasons why to bottom-post.
Bottom-posting with message trimming is in fact very effective way of reducing chaos in email communication. Bottom-posting is actually a special case of inline-posting, where replies are interleaved with the previous email's message. Firstly bottom-posting provides a logical flow to the discussion in the email. It makes sense to have answer below the question instead of the other way round. Secondly with bottom-positing, the part of the message that is irrelevant can easily be trimmed away leaving just the part of the message to which reply is to be written, thus long scrolling can be avoided. But there are exceptions to this.
On the flip side, top-posting allows easy reading of the latest reply, but not necessarily indicating what part of email it is referring to. Another plus point of top-posting is that the entire scroll to the bottom of the email is avoided.
Though it indicates bottom-posting makes sense (atleast to me and some others; in fact many others..there are many mailing lists where top-posting is a breach of etiquette), corporate emails and most email users in general top-post. This is mainly because most popular email clients - Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express in particular place the cursors right at the start of the replies instead at the end. And people are stuck with it. If most of the people top-post for over so many decades now, it does not mean it is the right thing. They are simply misleaded.
Talking about the exceptions, top-post sometimes can be useful. Actually its common-sense in deciding whether to bottom-post or top-post while replying to emails.
Top-post *ONLY* if:
- replies are really short like yes or no and they refer to previous email in its entirety and it is unlikely to have another reply to this reply
- when thread so far has been using top-post, so just to go with the flow without a possible breach of etiquette
Or else, by all means bottom-post!
It matters when email is THE basic communication medium of the age.
PS: wow, this fills in the gaps: http://www.caliburn.nl/topposting.html
Bottom-posting with message trimming is in fact very effective way of reducing chaos in email communication. Bottom-posting is actually a special case of inline-posting, where replies are interleaved with the previous email's message. Firstly bottom-posting provides a logical flow to the discussion in the email. It makes sense to have answer below the question instead of the other way round. Secondly with bottom-positing, the part of the message that is irrelevant can easily be trimmed away leaving just the part of the message to which reply is to be written, thus long scrolling can be avoided. But there are exceptions to this.
On the flip side, top-posting allows easy reading of the latest reply, but not necessarily indicating what part of email it is referring to. Another plus point of top-posting is that the entire scroll to the bottom of the email is avoided.
Though it indicates bottom-posting makes sense (atleast to me and some others; in fact many others..there are many mailing lists where top-posting is a breach of etiquette), corporate emails and most email users in general top-post. This is mainly because most popular email clients - Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express in particular place the cursors right at the start of the replies instead at the end. And people are stuck with it. If most of the people top-post for over so many decades now, it does not mean it is the right thing. They are simply misleaded.
Talking about the exceptions, top-post sometimes can be useful. Actually its common-sense in deciding whether to bottom-post or top-post while replying to emails.
Top-post *ONLY* if:
- replies are really short like yes or no and they refer to previous email in its entirety and it is unlikely to have another reply to this reply
- when thread so far has been using top-post, so just to go with the flow without a possible breach of etiquette
Or else, by all means bottom-post!
It matters when email is THE basic communication medium of the age.
PS: wow, this fills in the gaps: http://www.caliburn.nl/topposting.html
