I prefer a top-post. I don’t want to scroll down to the bottom to read a reply.
Seriously?
No
Top-posters and HTML emailers should both go and fuck themselves mutually and reflexively. And then go fuck those who sign every single post.
Regards
Shodan
Count me in with the bottom-post haters. I don’t want to scroll, it annoys me every time. I just discovered that some communities actually prefer this no-style 
Ok, so the following comes from a person working under ubuntu Linux and passing a lot of time on the command line, professionally and private. I run windows only in a virtual machine and only when being force to (see the last paragraph of this rant).
I also started email in the very early 90ies using “elm” (a command line tool unter UNIX):
I deliberately use HTML in email when it is convenient. For instance, when I send pictures and I want to write captions. In professional email I often use bullets, italics and bold type face, indentions and sometimes (rarely), tables. Just tell me why I shouldn’t. It’s convenient and even (sophisticated) command line readers now support HTML (I now use thunderbird though). Everybody should be able to read my emails.
What I hate, is not HTML in mails, but text emails written in a file in a proprietary text processing format introduced by a software company based in Redmond. Don’t send me .doc’s unless it’s a real document. Don’t send me emails in docs. This is bad, bad, bad, bad.
This makes no sense. The reply should come after what is being replied to. I do not like reading a post and thinking “WTF is he talking about?” and then find out WTF he was talking about.
This is why I was in my local Freecycle Yahoo group for literally less than a day. I don’t need to wade through shit just to give stuff away.
If you read your emails by DATE, you could actually keep up with conversation. If the content STILL confuses you, you can THEN read the stuff down below.
Exactly. I’m not on public mailing lists, but when it comes to emails, I always (and most people I can think of off the top of my head) reply above the quoted text. I’m generally aware enough of whom I’m emailing and why that I don’t need to scroll through paragraphs of nested quotes to figure out the context. Give me the most recent and pertinent information up top, ASAP. If my brain is frazzled, then I can scroll down and figure out what you’re replying to, but usually that’s not the case.
Yes, I agree … for a message board (as you can see I always respond below the quote on this board), and for some emails where you respond to several points of your correspondent, as on a message board. I then split the quoted email and always respond below.
But in emails, this is actually rarely the case. Most emails are just … text, an answer to something, perhaps, but the quote is rarely needed. I know many people who systematically hit “reply” (and sometimes “reply all”, but that is another rant) whenever they want to write me an email and quote the whole message. In most cases their message is only loosely related to mine, often not at all. Still, I have to scroll through my message to discover what they write. Needless to say that they do not write a new subject line, so when you want to find this message days, weeks, months, years later, you need to do a full text search.
I know people who, I think, never ever typed their own subject lines. Sometimes I get messages which are replies to emails I sent months ago. And yet there is all the quoted text. They must find it easier to search an old message of mine and hit reply then to write a new one. Or perhaps they don’t know that new emails can be written. I imagine that some people just think that every email is a descendant of another email in a very long chain originated at from a single first email sent some decades ago in arpanet.
Sorry, I hate it.
hit reply, Control A, Delete, type in reply
unless I have some compelling reason to think I am dealing with a moron or an esl person I dont usually bother with sending back the infinite chain that started the conversation but if I do it sure as fuck will be on top.
anyone who is to dumb to A:remember what we are talking about or B:to figure it out from context/the crap below is also to dumb to continue associating with on a level where I give a crap about their preferences.
My reply was about posts, not emails.
Whatever the style of the community, you work with that style. Top-posting, bottom-posting, whatever. Just stick with the standard.
I know there are people out there who will laud or defend top-posting, but the only reason it exists is basically because Microsoft configured Outlook to do that by default. Bottom-posting was the norm in email and newsgroups before that, and almost every web-based community I’ve seen (including this) has generally gone with bottom-posting as a standard. It appears to be more natural.
But whichever one you pick, for the love of god, trim the crap from your reply that isn’t either a) your reply, or b) direct and necessary context for your reply.
That’s really what it boils down to, at least regarding my problem with digest mailing lists. Top post, bottom post, it wouldn’t matter so much if everything OTHER than what’s specifically being responded to was deleted.
Heh.
I beg to differ. I bitch about bottom-posting, but it still concerns a minority only of the emails I get.
Btw, Thunderbird does top posting as a standard option, and I don’t even know whether you can change this to bottom posting.
Fortunately a very large majority uses thunderbird at my office here, and also a very large majority of my friends. I do not know many people who use Outlook. The joys of academia 
Can I add people who apparently simply haven’t figured out how the standard quote/reply thing works? There are one or two people on one of my lists who apparently quote by copy/pasting the quoted text into a new e-mail, and then use “rich text” features to color-code the quoted text and their replies. In the process, the standard-by-now “>” is never inserted in front of the quoted text, and of course the color-coding completely disappears when viewed in any mail client that isn’t MS Outlook. The result is a series of paragraphs with nothing to differentiate between quoted text and replies, and if you’re coming in at the middle of the conversation it ends up reading like complete nonsense because it looks like it’s all one writer rambling all over the place.
I actually find MOST of time I dont need no stinking posting of whats being replied to at all. IME not even there is as good as on the top or on the bottom. If I really get confused, I go find what/where the original post is.
Human beings have been having productive conversations without voice recorders and replay devices for thousands of years.
To me, while maybe technically and politeness wise, replying to a posting at the bottom (with the original material on the top) makes sense, it mostly appears to me to be a crutch to folks who arent bothering to keep up with the conversation in the first place.
As people have mentioned , the hate is a holdover from the nineties and earlier. Folks who used usenet would come from colleges and univercities, just hit reply to , with about twenty previously quoted replies , all to say Ditto at the bottom.
Which was probably understandable when using a T-1 line or what ever the schools were using, but infuriating when forced to wade through this , with anywhere from a 300 to a 9600 baud modem on a dial up account that would charge so much money, in the days before even flat rate internet service.
html was even worse cause your just getting binary strings and a weird looking reply.
Im betting this is coming up again because of pda’s and smart phones for some reason.
Declan
My guess is that smart phones which do not understand HTML emails will be doomed from the very beginning. And given the fact that we now send pictures and movies per GSM, the communication overhead spent on the HTML tags is negligible.