Top Posting Question

[John Wendel]

alan wrote:
> 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? Moreover, thunderbird appears 
>> to have no user options to bottom post and view emails from the bottom 
>> (or Usenet articles either).
>>
>> 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.  I was flabbergasted to find that he was right.  Why 
>> doesn't thunderbird open at the bottom by default, with a user-option 
>> to open at the top if you really want to ?
> 
> "Because Outlook does it that way."
> 
> Outlook is the biggest offender here.  It pretty much forces you to top 
> post.  (And makes it quite hard to change.)  Thunderbird probably just 
> copied the default behaviour of Outlook.
> 
> At least thinderbird will allow you to break quoted sections apart 
> without major pain.  Outlook does not allow inserting in the middle of a 
> quoted section without mucking with it until you get it right.
> 
> People learn their posting habits from the first environment they used 
> e-mail in.  These days far too many people learn them at work where they 
> are required to use Outlook.
> 
> Sad but true.
> 

Sad, but not (always) true. I'm forced to use Craplook at work, and 
the version I use always starts a reply at the bottom. Maybe it was 
re-configured by someone smart, but not by me.

Regards,

John