Top-posting

[Ben McGinnes]

On Thu, Apr 28, 2016 at 11:26:52AM +0200, Matthias Apitz wrote:
> El día Thursday, April 28, 2016 a las 11:02:30AM +0200, Paolo Bolzoni escribió:
> 
>> When you follow an email thread you do not read everything, you
>> just read the new email and it makes little difference if it is in
>> the top.  Besides most email clients actually put an indentation in
>> the quoted text so it should look like:

I'd say this varies according to the thread and how much one cares to
follow the whole thing.  For example the "top-posters vs. the rest of
the world" debate just never seems to die so I just skimmed it this
time.

> I have the feeling (and even could proof this with examples) that
> top posters do not even read about what they are posting on top
> of. They just want to say something, sometimes useless, because it
> is already said/answered a few lines down).

That seems to be more prevalent amongst M$ Outhouse users.

> Speaking more technically, the problem is that 'modern' MUA, like
> OutLook crap, thunderbird or other browser-like MUA do not invite to
> post and quote correctly.

Thunderbird does, but it also has other problems.

> They put the cursor above the first line (sometimes you can not even
> configure this, and also not the correct citation with '> ') and
> they do not provide the required tools/commands to trim the old
> text, i.e. for example delete 150 lines with just saying '150dd' or
> '.,$-20d' or others. In these 'modern' MUA you must carefully place
> the cursor with the mouse, highlight even more carefully the text
> you want to delete, and doing this with the limitation of a
> smartphone is really a PITA.

I don't have an answer for all smartphone and tablet users (other than
the sensible ones who will SSH from their phone into another system
and use Mutt or some other CLI MUA), but for the iPhone and iPad users
I did find this solution from John Gruber (the guy who invented
Markdown):

http://daringfireball.net/2007/07/non_top_posting_scripts

> That's why I do prefer 'mutt' and 'vim'.

Or Mutt and Emacs.  ;)


Regards,
Ben
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