Sometimes top posting is the right approach, sometimes point by point is.
But in either case, trimming the responses... Or if the discussion has become diffuse and you are responding to many people making similar points, eliminating them entirely.
The interaction issue here is that the email clients aren't really built for threaded discussion. Even the ones that are supposed to be supporting threads. Trimming replies has been email culture for 40 years. The principle that the machine do as much as possible for the human is obvious. So why don't the clients automatically trim?
I suspect there is also a large measure of homeopathic usability testing blocking the possibility of improvement. I have a research degree in a hard science, I know what it takes to collect good data. I see findings from 25 year old studies quoted as immutable holly truths that are only rejected out of ignorance. And most of the time the people quoting the study never read it and are misquoting.
The user population is changing over time. If a study is over five years old, it is probably useless. If it is ten years old, throw it away, it is of historic interest only.
Like Kieth says, we need to experiment with this.
