alan wrote:
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.
Sad, but not (always) true. I'm forced to use Craplook at work, and
the version I use always starts a reply at the bottom. Maybe it was
re-configured by someone smart, but not by me.
Regards,
John
