[ubuntu-uk] Moan -- Top Posting (was "Apps for kids")

[David D Lowe]

I only joined this mailing list yesterday and already I've witnessed a 
flame-war!

It's funny, I was reading through the emails one by one, thinking how 
annoying it was to to scroll quoted messages for every single email. I 
remember thinking: "oh, that's nice", when Neil didn't top-post. 
Obviously, my feelings weren't shared! :-)

I personally prefer Sean Miller's style of quoting: only quote what 
you're responding to, and only one or two sentences, then include your 
reply. It eliminates unnecessary scrolling and and gives context in one 
go. If you don't need to quote anything, don't.

It's a software problem, IMO. AFAIK, there's no use-case for quoting the 
entire message, as most email clients do by default. Clients should 
automatically delete quotes of entire email messages, and allow users to 
easily access the whole thread.

I don't think this issue is going away until all email software is 
better designed, which might be never. So let's just try and be tolerant 
of each other's ignorance/laziness/preference. I think it's worth it.