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Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

I think this hugely overthinks things and it's actually a lot simpler: Outlook and other Microsoft tools didn't support bottom-posting. It was only kind-of possible if you changed several settings and even then you had to manually change stuff in every reply. That by far the most important reason top-posting "won".

I use past tense because I haven't used any of this Microsoft stuff for over 10 years, but I assume this is still the case.

This sort of moves the question to "why did Outlook only support top-posting?" I don't have a clear answer to that, but if I look at the general state of Microsoft and email at the time then it's probably a combination of the Not-Invented-Here (and maybe some "EEE") attitude at Microsoft at the time combined with a general apathy and ignorance towards email.

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Yes exactly. The first text-based email clients I used that quoted the original message in a reply[1] defaulted to bottom posting. They'd include the message with the ">" prefix on each line, and your cursor would be positioned at the bottom of that. So at that time most people did inline or bottom replies.

Microsoft Email/Exchange/Outlook as best I can remember have always defaulted to quoting the message and leaving the cursor at the top. And they didn't prefix the quoted text in any way, so to do inline replies you'd have to make it clear which text was quoted and which text was new. People would use colors or different fonts when "rich" text became supported but it was more work and most people just took the easy path.

[1] Very early on, MUAs did not (at least by default) quote the original message. This was because most people were using teletypes or slow (300 baud) terminals and possibly a line-oriented editor such as 'ed' so quoting the original message could add significant extra time needed to compose a reply. Also, with a mail client that does proper threading, you can see which message is being replied to and you don't really need to include that again in the reply.

I'd say Gmail defaulting[1] to top posting, when it was publicly released in 2004, was definitely the nail in the coffin.

[1]: Likely done for reasons of Outlook compatibility/familiarity.

I switched back to mutt after years of TB and, man, is it sooo easy to quote inline. I'd missed it. I'm sure a bunch of recipients are wondering wtf I'm doing. :)

> Outlook and other Microsoft tools didn't support bottom-posting.

That. Reading an email thread in Outlook is an exercise in masochism.

> I assume this is still the case.

It is, $job's outlook install still "top posts" by default, just like always.

There is no such thing as "supporting [top/bottom] posting". You have a text editor and a cursor, the real alternative is not "top" vs "bottom" but "I care about the context of the discussion" vs "I don't care". In the first case, you edit the quoted text and then answer inline, and in the second you just type your one line answer and hit "send".

Top posting did not win anything. Lazyness did.

This is incorrect. The initial cursor position and automatic email signature being at the top rather than at the bottom already makes a huge difference. Add to that the absence of tools to easily insert inline replies and cut down or reformat quoted parts, plus the absence of navigational behavior when reading mail that would jump to the first non-quoted part first, which earlier email clients used to have.

Yes, when I had to use Outlook because of $dayjob I did bottom-post and it was absolutely an uphill battle. In the end I resorted to some custom VBScript code I wrote myself to make some aspects easier.

In hindsight, all of that was a mistake because all my coworkers top-posted. Top-posting might be bad (IMHO), but a mixture of bottom and top is even worse.

I now just top-post. I'm still not a fan but it is what it is.

Ah, let's not get started about "Why email signatures has won" :)

Not sure what you mean, email signatures were standard well before Outlook. What changed is that the convention of beginning them with a line consisting of “-- ” wasn’t adopted by Outlook & friends, so automatic detection/hiding/non-quoting suffers.

I mean that we already have SMTP headers for metadata.

Such as in-reply-to (no need to quote the whole mail at the bottom of yours) and obviously the sender (no need for an explicit signature), and you could use x-face if you needed something fancier or, if your company really really needs to remind everyone how social they are at every message, you could have added an x-coprorate-blurb custom header, etc.

Whatever, emails these days are nothing more than an archaic last resort password reset protocol.

> Top posting did not win anything. Lazyness did.

In addition to what the sibling comment already points out, most people don't even know what "top posting" or "bottom posting" is because they just do what the email client does by default (which in Outlook's case: strongly favours top posting).

The only "lazy" thing here is this kind of smug judgemental attitude instead of looking for the actual reasons.

If you are using Microsoft Outlook mobile app or the webmail, inline or bottom posting experience is garbage, it doesn't quote/format the previous email, it just slaps it at the bottom. If you want to respond inline you better put some color else it's unreadable.

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