Reply at the top or reply at the bottom?

[David Carlson]

It is a good thing that the topic is not related to politics.  One response
did relate it to religion...

I see there is no clear consensus beyond making all replies contain enough
context to be clear about what point is being made, which I do find
helpful.

Today I re-tried the GMail app for Android and found it to be much less
confusing than it was the last time I tried it.  Since it is able to read
encrypted mail that is a big plus over the plain vanilla Android app.

Thank you all for your comments.

David C

On Fri, Apr 21, 2017 at 11:28 AM, David T. via gnucash-user <
gnucash-user at gnucash.org> wrote:

> Dustin,
>
> I’m with you. I prefer top posting—especially when I am looking at
> messages on a small screen. It can be challenging to have to scroll through
> many screen on a phone just to see the new stuff.
>
> Since I still possess enough of my faculties that I can generally remember
> what has been said before, I don’t find it necessary to be “helped” with
> inline responses. To be honest, I detest inline responses; it forces me to
> try and determine which lines in a long thread are actually new, and I find
> this onerous. Furthermore, many email programs seem to munge the formatting
> of inline responses, so it becomes practically impossible to determine
> which text is new, and which is not.
>
> David
>
> > On Apr 21, 2017, at 7:21 PM, Dustin Henning <The00Dustin at gmx.com> wrote:
> >
> > 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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