Tom, always the voice of reason.

See below for my comment indicated by the less-than sign (open, angled 
bracket); that should be just the equivalent of > appearing on the quoted 
lines, right?

First Horizon Bank
Mainframe Technical Support

-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> On Behalf Of Tom 
Brennan
Sent: Saturday, June 13, 2020 2:03 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: Quote style

[External Email. Exercise caution when clicking links or opening attachments.]

Tom's opinion:  Top posting is like a meeting where one person talks, everybody 
hears it, and the conversation continues without having to explain the whole 
meeting each time.  When someone new comes along though, it would be nice to 
have a chronological history of what happened before - that's bottom posting.  
And that includes archiving when the "someone new" might be reading the 
conversation years later.

I like top posting because most of my work is real-time conversations.
If someone really wants bottom posting to catch up or for whatever reason, then 
it doesn't seem too hard for them to make a script or find a program to reverse 
the order of the conversation locally.  I do that manually every once in a 
while when someone at work says, "Tom, can you go through this month-long email 
thread and try to help?"  Ouch.  So the first thing I do is start with a 
notepad window open and make notes from the bottom up, not only reversing the 
email string, but also trying to weed out only what I really need to better 
understand the issue.

Now I sometimes do a combination like Curtis just did, where I'll include 
portions of the original email and make comments underneath each portion.  I'll 
usually do that by top posting with a copy/paste of just the part I'm 
referencing.  I rarely do the "See my response in red/green/blue below" 
intermixed in the entire original email.  When people do that to me, I often 
have trouble finding that one little red word somewhere in the pile.

< Really?  It always seems to work a lot better than this silliness.  Red 
sticks out like a sore thumb to me.  :)

On 6/13/2020 10:21 AM, Charles Mills wrote:
> What is it with tech bulletin boards and the fuss about top-posting? I will 
> bet I have gotten tens of thousands of business e-mail replies in my life and 
> every single one of them was "top-posted."
>
> What is it about tech bulletin boards where folks seem to want the most 
> relevant stuff -- the new stuff -- at the BOTTOM???
>
> I *like* Outlook.
>
> Charles
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] 
> On Behalf Of Paul Gilmartin
> Sent: Saturday, June 13, 2020 9:54 AM
> To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
> Subject: Quote style (was: ... Passive FTP ... )
>
> On Sat, 13 Jun 2020 13:17:11 +0000, Jackson, Rob wrote:
>
>> My cruddy email application (Outlook) doesn't do the >-style quoting (or at 
>> least I don't know how to make it), so let me try below with tabs; it will 
>> probably be ugly.
>>
> Does First Horizon require you to use Outlook?  I mostly post from the 
> LISTSERV Web interface.
>
> Does it enforce top-posting?  Does it prohibit editing quoted text, 
> heaps of legal disclaimers and all?
>
>> First Horizon Bank
>> Mainframe Technical Support
>
> -- gil
>
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