All depends on how you view the flow of conversation and how we attempt to convert asynchronous multi-participant email conversations back into the more natural real-time conversations.

Top posting can be very confusing if you are replying to a specific point in a longer thread..several days later. In normal conversation, you would be inclined to interject and stop the original speaker soon after the comment was made and you would want to comment on was spoken. Email doesn’t easily allow for this. Especially when the email conversation is on a mailinglist where the conversation is not blocking on you to reply back and just keeps rolling along. This differs from personal or work email where the discussion typically is blocking on you to respond.

You also have to realize that common mailinglists management software like listman offer digest formats which are not threaded. These are still used by people and these digest formats break the threading hints which your preferred top-posting policy implicitly relies on. I would encourage you to sign up for a mailinglist and subscribe only to the daily digest format and see if top-posting feels more readable to you.

The underlying problem is leaving the entire original post as quoted text. It seems like a good idea…but is horrible for mailinglists readability. Its appropriate for personal or work email that is not publicly archived. In a publicly archived mailinglist, what is quoted should be contextually relevant to your reply. If 90% of the original email doesn’t apply to your reply..don’t include it either at the top or at the bottom in a publicly archived list. The original is archived you don’t need to include the full email for reference. The rules for personal correspondence are different because there’s no publicly archived record.

-jef

And HTML email is much better than plain text. Quoted text shows up in clearly-delimited blocks, with natural word wrap instead of archaic forced 72 character breaks, text can be emphasized, put in bullet points, switched between proportional and fixed-width font blocks. Anyone who advocates against HTML email in the year 2009 is a moron. Should we make the Web plain text, too? “Yes! It’s sooo much more efficient!!1″

Even the author of “Why HTML in E-Mail A Bad Idea” got over it: http://birdhouse.org/blog/2006/01/15/html-email-the-poll/ You should, too.

There are valid use cases for top posting though none that you would not be able to trash into one of “laziness, arrogance and ignorance”. In a long discussion some like to see the most relevant/recent replies nearer to the top and not the bottom to get the latest context quickly.

Yes, you can figure out what the order of posting might be (some of the time), but top posting absolutely goes against the way people read: down the page!

Just because email clients default to posting above quotations doesn’t mean you should use it in that way. I think that behaviour started with Outlook or Outlook Express, hardly bastions of sensible computing.

What I find funny is that it’s nearly 2010 and people still cannot come up with a justification for top posting though that cannot hide their laziness, arrogance and ignorance.

WHO CARES?

It’s a completely pointless guideline that exists only so that armchair cops have an excuse to stroke their egos at the newcomer’s expense. Anyone with three brain cells can deduce the order of the conversation. People just argue about it because they’re dicks.

Modern email clients hide the previous quotes anyway, threading everything in chronological order. How many decades has it been since Usenet was created, and people are still arguing about this? Adapt technology to fit human behavior; don’t try to force humans to adapt an unnatural style to suit some obsolete technology. In 2001, we were supposed to have (homicidal) computers capable of perfect speech and voice recognition. 8 years later and people are still arguing about the best way to format messages in a plain text medium…

This is exactly the sort of idiocy that prevents Linux from being anything more than a toy for arrogant nerds.

You know, maybe that top posting signature has a point. Maybe top-posting IS confusing… Maybe mailing lists are just populated with morons.