But really, what it boils down to is: write your answer after the question! If you’re replying to the whole thing, I don’t see any argument for top vs bottom, but if there are a bunch of questions, this kind of top-posted reply is really unreadable:

Yes.
No.
With sugar.

Alice wrote:
> Should I get some more food?
> And perhaps some muffins?
> How do you like your coffee?

vs

Alice wrote:
> Should I get some more food?

Yes.

> And perhaps some muffins?

No.

> How do you like your coffee?

With sugar.

in a way however, you are right, because when it turns into a conversation, it gets confusing. that is where threading-powered clients and applications have an advantage, as you dont have to include the entire email conversation into the message quotation…

difficult stuff

\n-- \n

where “\n” is the newline character.

@A.Y Siu- Your top-posting assumes that I want to read the thread from bottom-to-top, a convoluted way of reading threaded conversations. Please check out every other Internet protocol that supports conversations. It’s practically universally unanimous. Bottom-posting is the way we read. It makes zero sense to put the reply at the top.

I’m saying your advice sounds great for mailing lists, but what regular emails to your friends and family? I don’t think of emails to friends and families as “threaded conversations.” I want to read their reply. Anything quoted below is just a reminder in case I forgot what we were talking about.

Well done. That’s exactly the arrogance I was talking about. “Fix your client!”. It’s a _phone_ with a mail app shipped on the firmware. There is no source, it’s a google closed source mail client.

You’re sounding more and more like comic book guy from the simpsons with each blog post.

And top posting isn’t really evil – bottom posting is worse if the quoting is equivalent. I prefer top or mixed and I suspect the only reason bottom posting was the convention is that is where the original email clients traditionally put the cursor. And for no other good reason.

Stop fussing with ancient technical trivialities that were discussed to death decades ago. Netiquette should be more about treating others with respect, keeping posts on topic on specialist mailing lists, not nagging or re-asking the same questions, not mis-quoting to push a given view, starting new threads rather than replying to them, and remembering they are public places.

Keep the width of your message under 80 characters.
This might sound like an odd netiquette rule, but wrapping your message at 80 characters makes it easier for the recipient to read your message. In fact, the psychology department at Witchita State University did a study on this very thing. Which is better for reading text? Long columns of text or shorter columns? The results of the survey showed that people could read faster with greater accuracy and have better comprehension with two-column justified text than three-column (too short) or one-column (too long).

Translating this to email, people don’t want to read lengthy columns of text. When you wrap your text to a shorter justification, but not too short, as the study shows, it’s easier for the reader to comprehend what you’re talking about, and they can read through the text quicker. Major publishers know this as well. Pick up your favorite novel, and count the number of characters on a single line. I have a paperback copy of Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, and each line is wrapped at exactly 60 characters. I have another paperback copy of Macbeth, by Shakespeare. Each line wraps at exactly 50 characters. Looking through all my novels, I’m actually struggling to find a book that has more than 85 characters on a single line. The Debian System, written by Martin Krafft, wraps at 85 characters.

The standardized accepted practice for email, is to actually wrap your email text at 72-75 columns. This gives enough room for others to reply to your message, which will usually prepend the two characters “> ” to your original message, and still keep the length of the mail under 80 characters. As would be expected, Microsoft Outlook seems to struggle with this when writing emails initially, but can be configured to wrap at 80 characters for replies.