Re: Top Posting Question

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

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