John Gruber writes a short entry about top posting.
Top posting is the process where you reply to an email by adding your comments at the top of the email and not editing the content beneath. In many cases it means that you need to scroll to the bottom of the message to get the gist of a conversation.
I agree with John wholeheartedly.
I like to edit down the replies to the smallest amount possible. I like to intersperse my replies to various sections into the meat of the email – though this behaviour is something that completely freaks out email newbies especially if you’re disagreeing with them – they see it as unnecessary nitpicking.
Editing emails down in Outlook is harder and this is the reason that top posting caught on. It’s a lot more effort to attribute text (you have to colour it) and, face it, most people who use Outlook have never and will never pay attention to top-posting etiquette.
This is a rehash of the Rich Text versus ASCII email flamewars. I think to a degree we have to just accept that this is the de facto standard. We can continue to use the behaviours we like but there is no guarantee that we’re going to receive what we like.
That all said.
I top-post.
I top-post when using my iPhone. And this is because it’s the default action and because editing text is hard on tiny devices. The iPhone email application is pretty poor for editing text, there’s no selection, there’s no copy paste. It’s the email client for the Outlook generation.
I’ll leave you to make your own judgement on this.