bottom-post vs top-post, email readibility

[gusl]

This lack of standards about email can be an annoyance for me. Some people are top-posters, some are bottom-posters. Newsgroups/mailing lists enforce bottom-post. Top-post has the advantage of not requiring scrolling (though GMail's "Hide quoted text" makes this obsolete). Bottom-post (especially when divided into several chunks) allows you to read the messages as a conversation. I'm a fan of quoting, because it saves me from typing.

I prefer bottom-post, but I tend to yield to the other person's style, but only if they write the first reply... If neither person yields, the conversation could end up like this (Bottomy replying):


-----------------------------------------------------------

See you soon.

Bottomy wrote:
|Toppie wrote:
||Does 5:00pm work for you?
||
||Bottomy wrote:
|||Toppie wrote:
||||I was thinking of playing squash. You interested?
||||
|||||Bottomy wrote:
||||||Toppie wrote:
||||||What are you doing later today?
|||||
|||||No plans yet. What about you?
|||
|||Yes. Where and what time?
|
|Sounds good. See you then.

It's even worse if you yield too late, and make inconsistent.

...or if they use different character, one can get textures like:
>|>|>|>

I haven't seen ':' as a quotation marker for a long time.

Comments

[inferno0069.livejournal.com]

I'm on a list with someone that uses initials for quoting and only quotes one level deep. e.g.

"GL" == Gustavo Lacerda <gustavolacerda@example.com>
"SOG" == Some Other Guy <sog@example.com>

I need some example text, so I'll just mention that I'm usually in favor of
bottom-posting. Also, since I need an example of the quoting I'm demonstrating,
I'll note that you said

  GL> I haven't seen ':' as a quotation marker for a long time.

to which someone might reply

  SOG> I use ':' all the time! Except for Thursdays, when I use '#'.

As for myself, I've only ever (intentionally) used stacking '>'s, but I noticed
that mutt and/or vim recognize quite a few symbols. I've sometimes wondered how
so many could become "standard" enough to merit inclusion as a default.

[hober.livejournal.com]

They likely use Emacs; that looks like the output from SuperCite.