Just doing my civic duty, here is a posting by Stuart Jansen to the Salt Lake Linux Users Group mailing list:
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
A: No.
Q: Should I include quotations after my reply?See also: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1855.html
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/top-post.html
Enough said.
{ 7 } Comments
Top posting in a normal email is different from doing it in a usenet post in that:
1. In my experience, most emails are between a small number of people.
2. All parties involved have generally been following and reading the whole thing.
2. It’s expected rather than abhorred.
Totally agreed with James.
@James and @Sam- It’s not different at all. It doesn’t matter who you are addressing, conversations read from oldest to newest, left to right, top to bottom. Look at blog comments, for example, or forum posts. Can you imagine what it would be like if the oldest post was at the bottom, and the most recent post up top?
Top-posting is extremely arrogant of the sender. It assumes that everyone wants to read that post before all others. Further, top-posting encourages massive, MASSIVE replies, as no one bothers trimming out the fat, and giving only the relevant information critical for his reply.
There’s nothing good out of top-posting.
In my experience, people who top-post do not selectively quote (“trim fat”) either. I suppose you won’t see the beauty of it until you get both right.
Also, inline forwarding is the devil.
It’s terribly annoying.
Loved the quote.
I am the buttmeister
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