Email: Top vs. Bottom Posting
February 17, 2013
I’ve always been taught it’s polite to trim emails and type the reply below the text I’m responding to:
Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
> Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
>> Top-posting.
>>> What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
But technology has changed. Mail readers used to show just a single message, but now they group related messages together. When you need to see the context of a reply you can look up and see past messages. Because you rarely need to look at quoted sections, they can be collapsed by default. [1] Email etiquette is all about being considerate of your reader, but now that tools have caught up with usage, top and bottom posting are equally easy to read.