Top Posting Question

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Wed, 24 Oct 2007, Jonathan Allen wrote:

> Dear List,
>
> Given that the preference on this list is trimming and
> bottom/mid-posting, and that Thunderbird is one of the principle
> mail agents used in the Fedora and Linux world, why does it always
> open incoming emails at the top, and compose new emails with the
> cursor at the top immediately ready to top-post?

the evilness of top posting is covered nicely here:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines#head-21931671219f9e2ecd6ec8655a3d582326699379

but, regardless of whether or not your email client can be configured
to automatically go to the bottom upon reply, there's nothing
inherently wrong with positioning you at the top initially for a
simple reason:  your mail client clearly has no idea where you want to
start inserting reply text (what you would call "mid-posting").

it might be that you want to add some reply text immediately after
the first line, so it's your job to move there before typing.

> I am trying to persuade a colleague of the evil of top-posting and
> he has just beaten me up on exactly this point - *if* the Linux
> community is to keen to discourage bottom posting, why don't the
> standard tools work that way.

because "bottom posting" doesn't necessarily mean *exactly* bottom
posting -- it simply means adding your reply text *after* what you're
replying to.  and it's perfectly acceptable for something like that to
happen near the top of the message.

> I was flabbergasted to find that he was right.

you need to train yourself to be less easily flabbergasted.  :-)

rday

p.s.  i might go so far as to say that most people who whine
incessantly about having to move their cursor alllllllllllll the way
to the bottom of the message before typing in their reply are
precisely the same people who should be trimming the included text so
that they don't have that much to skip over in the first place.

-- 
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Robert P. J. Day
Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry
Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

http://crashcourse.ca
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