I used to think the same but I caved when I started using web interface email clients. Let’s face it, the world has moved on, new generations are online, and we are the wrong ones now.
It's one of the things I like about Gmail. It does plain-text and bottom quoting just fine.
> Let’s face it, the world has moved on, new generations are online, and we are the wrong ones now.
NEVER GIVE UP! NEVER SURRENDER!
https://mygeekwisdom.com/2014/03/15/never-give-up-never-surr...
Admittedly I haven't looked into it because I'm perfectly fine with top posted emails. But I routinely sort files in my directory. Why not emails in a displayed thread?
The ability to semantically parse text to determine what order paragraphs should be displayed in to suit the tastes of the individual reader is a very recent development. Or, rather, will be soon. Maybe not very soon.
If you need to address a specific point in a message you're replying to, quote just that bit.
We are emailing TBs of data around daily that provides no value to anyone.
The point of bottom posting was you never left the original text intact, but trimmed it to show the relevant details you are replying to and so enhance readability. Exactly as I am doing now in this reply.
> If you need to address a specific point in a message you're replying to, quote just that bit.
Precisely. Just like this. We are on the same page!
- parsing the unstructured email body and looking for quote levels, html formatting and printed email heads
- parsing certain headers like message-id, in-reply-to, dkim sig
- looking for sections of the message body in the inbox
This is done because there is nothing in the protocol to cleanly accomplish what you want. Even if there was, you could not rely on it at all. Doing anything with email is a gigantic PITA, you sometimes get emails where the msg-encoding header doesnt match the body's encoding, html in the plaintext section and other fun things.
Since nobody really cares about the RFC and just does their own thing, there is no chance at improvement.
I came up with a routine to parse and translate about 2-3GB of saved emails into MBox format once.
The official delimiter is unbelievable, IMHO.
« the exact character sequence of "From", followed by a single Space character (0x20), an email address of some kind, another Space character, a timestamp sequence of some kind, and an end-of-line marker. »
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4155
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox
That's it. An email is a section of text beginning with
From $something
That's the spec.
However, the original email is included as a convenience in case my MUA doesn't support threaded display or it's a mailing list I joined after the original email was sent or any other reason why I might not see it. That's why there is quoting at all.
Nobody top-posts when using selective quoting because obviously it's different.