Why would you want to scroll to the bottom of a long threaded email to read a reply? Top quoting makes all the sense in the world. If you want the back story, then read down.

Skuli makes a good point, but if people would do as Charli points out and only quote from the message you are responding to rather than include the entire thread history in your message, people wouldn’t have to scroll down. Keep message history in the message thread and not in every message IN the thread! :)

That said I hung up my sword and shield in this war long ago, but my children will be taught to bottom-quote! ;)

Thanks for the article Giles!

You are wrong about top-quoting in that you tell us the negatives without even trying to think up some reason why it might be that way. I get lots and lots of email and most of it has bounced back and forth between several parties before it even gets to my inbox.

I need to be able to look at it and see the nature and scope of the conversation and the back and forth, but I also need to cut to the chase and make a decision about what to do. Top quoting is perfect for that.

A three page email that starts off with the original, usually poorly worded complaint from a user is best read “back to front.” I don’t care what the original person even says half the time, I need to know what the discussion about it is and what the last thing said was. This is true of most business communications.

Bottom quoting is more conversational, and not good for professional environments. It’s also not good for anything over a send/reply pair in that every time you send that email back and forth, the receiver has to immediately scroll through a few pages to get to the part they want to see. It also encourages inter-quoting, which again, after a few back and forths makes the message unintelligible.

You imply that top-quoting exists merely by happenstance and because “that’s the way it always has been,” when in fact, it exists because it’s the best most efficient method for the largest number of people using email. There is no conspiratorial collusion between email client providers as you also imply, they all arrived at the same solution simply because it’s the best one.

Yeah…. no Giles. It’s less productive, a time waster, messing looking, and just retarted to reply underneath quotes – I abhor emails written like that

Most of us in work have to use the arghh, Outlook, it auto-top-quotes.

I started using computers at 7 years old…in 1981, so I am oldish and remember using bottom-quoted email in the bad old days, didn’t like it much then, but you lumped it, then at some point it flip over, was it when CC:Mail was big?

Sorry, but things move on and top-quoting more sense, it’s just something you get used to, it’s the way almost mail clients work now. An email thread is a chronological story, you read from eldest element to youngest, then add your very latest part to the ongoing story, at the top of the stack.

“Makes no logical sense, but people have got used to things being that way.”

It prevents users from having to scroll through a series of replies to read the most recent one. And in the vast majority of cases the most recent reply is the only one a user wants to see. That makes plenty of logical sense.

I am 3 time zones behind our engineering group. When I get to work I typically see a long back and forth between 3 or 4 people, some of them making verbose comments on technical issues. Acting on the last thing said w/o reading the entire conversation is almost always a bad thing.

In this (my) situation top quoting is annoying; scrolling up and down, up and down just to get the entire scoop.

So to say bottom quoting is ‘not good’ or ‘totally unacceptable in any professional environment’ is well…. unacceptable :P

even=ever… won’t EVER change. Might learn to spell though.