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

[mauitian.livejournal.com]

Top-post for short emails.
Bottom-post in chunks one level deep for long emails (unless keeping the second level is desirable in places).

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

This is exactly what I do, if by short you mean 1-3 sentences, i.e. the email has only one topic (this usually means 1 paragraph).

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

me three... I agree with your complaints here.. it's annoying that there are two standards; I prefer bottom posting, especially since I spent a lot of time on newsgroups at one point in life; yet I end up yielding to whatever the current thread is doing, or sometimes top posting if it's a quicky.