On Mon 11 Jan 2010 21:33 -0700, Steve Holmes wrote: > re-read the old stuff over and over again. Nothing annoys me more > than haveing to page through five generations of past messages in a > single thread to get all the way to the bottom just to have a single > line of text say something like "Thank you" or "I agree" or whatever. Fortunately I find that sort of thing isn't too common on the mailing lists. Usually more interesting or useful commentary is added to the discussion. > The only thing that makes bottom-posting, like this bareable to me at > all is Mutt's 'S' command which takes the cursor down to the unquoted > text for much quicker reading. I also find mutt's 'T' helps. It hides the quoted text. > If bottom-posting is so passionately desirable, then may I suggest > people trim down the history of a thread to the most recent 1 or 2 > generations back. Or maybe even better, just reply with no quoting > and and briefly summarize the quoted context. Yeah, I realize quoting > past context is more work. I just find that when people top-post, I > can seem to get through the mud a lot faster. Indeed trimming quotes is part of proper email ettiquette along with bottom posting. Sometimes I think people should pass a quiz before they're allowed to post to the mailing list. I think part of the problem is that some email clients like gmail webmail help persist the bad behaviour. They default with top posting replies and sending HTML emails. I have requested that they change the defaults, but haven't gotten any response. It isn't a big surprise though.
