Reply at the top or reply at the bottom?

[Buddha Buck]

On Fri, Apr 21, 2017 at 9:16 AM David Carlson <david.carlson.417 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Long ago (before GMail) it was pretty standard to reply to emails at the
> bottom and various email clients like Thunderbird handled threads very
> well, allowing readers to read messages in chronological order.
>

I disagree on both counts. Long ago (before GMail, Outlook, etc) it was
pretty standard to reply to emails *inline*, like I'm doing now. The
etiquette was to both delete parts of the message you are replying to
leaving just the context of your reply, and to put your reply near that
context. In a way, it is using editing to interject into the middle of a
recorded conversation.

I blame Outlook myself for the switch to top-posting replies, long before
GMail.

I also feel that Google did a lot of good in how they managed
"conversations" in gmail (and inbox).

Now, in GMail, which has an annoying habit of 'hiding' all the text below
> the first white space, a reply at the bottom may not even be visible when
> reading a 'new' reply.
>

There are multiple tools for reading mail from Google, including the Google
products gmail, inbox, and the associated Android clients. You can even use
Thunderbird, or pine (if you are really old-school), if you choose. I don't
use GMail, I use Inbox, so I see different annoying habits (like 'hiding'
quoted text behind an ellipsis, so I'll see the new text, but not the
context behind it).


> If some posters take the time to clip the history out of replies, the
> context gets lost so overly simple replies like "Yes" or "No" become
> meaningless.
>

Overly simple replies in a context-laden thread are meaningless anyway. If
you want to give a "Yes" or "No", better to cut out everything but what
that "yes" or "no" is in response to, especially if the conversation is
elsewhere.

Based on this, is there (1) an email client that keeps all this straight
>

I am happy with Google's Inbox client, for both browser and Android.  To
address your concerns with the Android mail client, Inbox groups related
messages into conversations. Conversations are sorted by newest message in
the conversation, but within a conversation, messages are sorted
chronologically (oldest at top). It also hides repeated text, so the
untrimmed footers and deeply-nested quoted material tends to get hidden.
Sometimes this hides too much context, but it is easy to reveal it.

and (2) has the preferred placement for replies changed?
>

Yes and no. I still prefer inline replies, but I feel that the current mail
clients make that hard, with almost all of them defaulting to top-posting.
Inbox makes it easy to do a "quick reply", but when it does so, it doesn't
even show you the full text you are sending, only the top-posted reply you
are adding. In order to do an inline reply like this one, I have to tell it
to pull up a full editing pane to do it in.

Outlook it horrid in this regard (at least, on my system), since it seems
like there isn't a way to do anything but top-posting.


>
> David C
>
>