Why? I grew up top posting (thanks to web mail clients), and personally I find having to scroll past tons of old messages in a thread to find the latest message is weird. Why is that preferred? I feel like I'm missing out on some big secret that top posting kills.
Emails can be automatically displayed in threads¹ and proper clients do so (e.g. Apple Mail) with the help of Message-ID and In-Reply-To headers. There are no reason to "hard-code" every previous message body into new message body when replying, i.e. quoting all the previous messages below/above your content. That's just plain stupid. Let the client do that for you in much better way.
If you need to give more context in your reply, you can quote a line or two in the above of your text. This is usually only needed for long messages. An example:
> This is a snipped from the message being replied to, i.e. quote.
> Just a line or two to give some context.
This is your text, where you you address the above concern. [More text...]
> Another quote regarding some other issue.
Your text here. The rule of thumb is to keep the quote shorter than your text.
I know there exist many broken email clients, but the solution is not to adapt for them but just keep following good practises. That's the only way to get the bad clients fixed. In the long run, everything else leads to more broken situation.
Bottom posting would be okay but what opponents of top posting are advocating is "inline quoting", which makes reading long chains of emails absolutely exhausting and obfuscated.
Top posting won for a reason: it saves everyone a lot of time.
No, top posting won because of Outlook (and to a lesser extent due to web clients).
The main evidence for this is that where I work (and surely in other places well), people who use Outlook end up re-inventing inline quoting, badly. They write their answers inline and use coloring to distinguish them because Outlook has no proper quoting support.
And the reason is quite simple: if each mail in a thread is only a small number of sentences, then top posting is fine. However, when you're trying to do serious technical work via email, replying to specific points is necessary. Inline quoting is simply the best way of clearly indicating which part of the original email you're replying to.
> which makes reading long chains of emails absolutely exhausting and obfuscated.
How do you mean? I've seen bottom posting be essentially abused, by folks that quote the entire preceeding email (and even others before it) before typing their 1 line reply. Or worse, folks that quote a giant thread and insert 1-2 line responses throughout the quoting, which require the reader to hunt for them. It seems that those cases could have been avoided by just cherry picking & quoting only what you wanted to respond to.
Or is there some other situation you have in mind with your response?
Because you keep reading the same thing over and over again while all you want to do is read the new content:
===
a
===
> a
b
===
> > a
> b
c
===
Another problem with inline quoting is that people are often lazy and quote everything, which means you need to scroll down a lot to hunt down for the new content.
> Another problem with inline quoting is that people are often lazy and quote everything, which means you need to scroll down a lot to hunt down for the new content.
The problem with top posting is that people systematically quote everything.
Inline quoting is what you just did here. It is the natural way for a discussion. The only interest of top posting is if you add new people to a thread and for them, bottom posting would be far more legible.
> The problem with top posting is that people systematically quote everything
I'd say it's the other way around.
Top posting fixes the problem of people quoting everything since everything is put below the signature.
The problem with inline quoting is that people quote entire paragraphs, even when they only mean to respond to a single sentence. Which leads to deluges of quoted text you have to scroll and scroll through until you reach the new content.
With Gmail and a top posted email discussion, I can catch up with the entire discussion with "n", read a few lines, "n", read a few lines, ... With inline quoting, catching up on such a discussion is exhausting.
Does no one else clear the quoted message entirely before replying? As far as I know every email client/webapp already threads messages. Including the same message multiple times just wastes space.
