Reply at the top or reply at the bottom?

[Dustin Henning]

OK, I don't know what "long ago" means, but I will say that as early as 
1994 (if not earlier), I was replying at the top of e-mails, and I 
didn't see any complaints for years (probably actually not even prior to 
2000).  I will also say that this was true in almost every e-mail client 
I used, some of which likely no longer exist.  In fact, I never saw 
complaints about replying to e-mails like this until I started getting 
involved in mailing lists.  Presumably, the etiquette and times being 
referred to actually preclude the Internet, involving dial-in BBS and 
that sort of thing.  Forums have mostly resolved that issue nicely for 
the majority of users (*nix users and users of FOSS programs that come 
to Windows and OS X from *nix being the minority [yes, I know OS X is 
based off of *nix, but most OS X users don't know that or use FOSS]).  I 
agree that in-line responses can be beneficial, but in some cases, 
especially involving persons who have any sort of disability that can 
hinder their ability to easily find the information that they need or 
discern between what is old and new in rich formats (for instance, 
colorblindness, legal blindness, full blindness), in-line responses can 
have their own set of challenges.  All of that having been said, all one 
can really do is reply how they reply, try to struggle through the ways 
others reply silently, politely request help/clarification if necessary, 
and avoid the seemingly rarer and rarer flame-wars on this topic (to be 
clear, by no means am I suggesting that this discussion is devolving 
into that).  However, the OP asked about mail clients that make this 
easy, and quite frankly, I'm not sure any exist.  Personally, I simply 
disable threading and sort my e-mails so I can go to previous e-mails in 
their original form in order to read through them.

On 4/21/2017 9:47 AM, Buddha Buck wrote:
> 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
>>
>>
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