On Wed, 24 Oct 2007, Jonathan Allen wrote:
Dear List,
Given that the preference on this list is trimming and bottom/mid-posting,
and that Thunderbird is one of the principle mail agents used in the Fedora
and Linux world, why does it always open incoming emails at the top, and
compose new emails with the cursor at the top immediately ready to top-post?
Moreover, thunderbird appears to have no user options to bottom post and view
emails from the bottom (or Usenet articles either).
I am trying to persuade a colleague of the evil of top-posting and he has
just beaten me up on exactly this point - *if* the Linux community is to keen
to discourage bottom posting, why don't the standard tools work that way. I
was flabbergasted to find that he was right. Why doesn't thunderbird open at
the bottom by default, with a user-option to open at the top if you really
want to ?
"Because Outlook does it that way."
Outlook is the biggest offender here. It pretty much forces you to top
post. (And makes it quite hard to change.) Thunderbird probably just
copied the default behaviour of Outlook.
At least thinderbird will allow you to break quoted sections apart without
major pain. Outlook does not allow inserting in the middle of a quoted
section without mucking with it until you get it right.
People learn their posting habits from the first environment they used
e-mail in. These days far too many people learn them at work where they
are required to use Outlook.
Sad but true.
--
Q: Why do programmers confuse Halloween and Christmas?
A: Because OCT 31 == DEC 25.
