Email: Top vs. Bottom Posting

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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.

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