On Fri, 22 Nov 2002, Saswata Banerjee & Associates wrote:
I am fully in favour of top posting. The current way in which most of you reply makes me have to go through the entire quoted mail, all older mails, links, etc just to ensure that I donot miss out some
Well the problem is that most people do not trim the OP to cut out irrelevant portions, so you end up getting the entire thread, while all that is required is just some snips from previous posts.
In general, original content posted should make up more than 70-80% of the message.
Interleaving your reply with the original post allows one who enters the thread late (or who receives mails out of order (which is extremely common on usenet, but also on mailing lists)) can read the thread in a conversational manner, ie, A - reply_to_A - B - reply_to_B - reply_to_reply_to_B - etc.
Quoting strategies are really a `use all or abuse it' kind of system.
Maybe I'll forward Tom Christianssen's message from clpm.
Philip
PS: Anybody play Jeopardy?