On Tue, 23 Oct 2007, Peter Pan wrote:
> I've been sort of wondering, remember the older snailmail? Well seems to me
> that mailboxes have a door/slot in the top instead of the bottom, and mail
> goes on top..... Maybe top posting is based on mail instead of email?

It's possible. Whether I top-post depends very much upon the message.

If I reply to a message and wish to address specific points of the
original message, then I edit out everything that is irrelevant to the
reply, and put my reply text immediately below the text being addressed.
This posting is an example.

Support, or other business-oriented, email is a different matter. Here,
there is a requirement to retain the complete text of the original message
(or series of messages) -- even if all you are adding is an "I agree".
In such cases, top-posting is more or less mandatory. Nobody wants to
wade through hundreds of lines of history just to get to a one-line
response -- but on the other hand there are certain contexts where you're
required to carry the history in your communications.

With all this said; in general it seems that top-posting is probably
inappropriate on most newsgroups which are "conversational" in nature.

A technical newsgroup or mailing list which carries bug reports and
support responses is a entirely different matter.

What *is* silly is the endless flaming about it. It is far more annoying
to read flames about inappropriate top-posting than it is to encounter
inappropriate top-posting.

-- Mark --

http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.