Gavin Flower <GavinFlower@archidevsys.co.nz> writes:
> The motivation of bottom posting like this: is that people get to see
> the context before the reply, AND emails don't end up getting longer &
> longer as people reply at the beginning forgetting to trim the now
> irrelevant stuff at the end.
Of course, this also requires that people have the discipline to trim
as much as possible of what they're quoting. Otherwise, not only do
the messages get longer and longer anyway, but you have to scroll to the
bottom to find what's new.
The general rule for proper email quoting is to quote just enough to
remind readers what the context is. You are not trying to create a
complete archive of the whole thread in every message; we have email
archives for that.
And the reason why this is worth doing is that it shows respect for
your readers' time. I'm not sure how many people look at each message
in a popular list like pgsql-general, but surely it's measured in the
thousands. If you spend a few minutes judiciously cutting quotes and
interspersing your responses in a logical fashion, that may save each
reader only a few seconds in reading/understanding your message, but
that's still a large net savings of time.
regards, tom lane