I'd much rather see the reply first - and if I need the context, I can then scroll down to see the quoted message. That way, I don't need to scroll through a lot of context I already know just to see someone's one-line response to it.
A big impact may simply have been the advent of greater storage and bandwidth capacities allowing bigger emails. Along with that, email clients threading messages for you allows for relatively seamless review of history if necessary.
And, the "selectively quote, then reply below" concept opens the door for biased selective quotations, where anyone getting in on a thread in the middle will likely be misunderstand the true context of the email they're receiving. Better to have the whole history, or none of it.
> ... users today understand how to keep an email thread
> alive in their memory, and do not need to read the
> entire chain, selectively quoted or not, before getting
> to the reply.
> Along with that, email clients threading messages for you
allows for relatively seamless review of history if necessary.At least, that's what happens when I use any of the standard email clients. but I don't. I use a really old, completely non-standard email client so I can, on every reply, extract the text that matters and assemble it into a single conversation, which I then continue.
Yes, I freely admit I'm unusual, but I find it incredibly frustrating that all the systems other people say "Well, it works for me" are, in my context, unusable. And when you say:
> Along with that, email clients threading messages
> for you allows for relatively seamless review of
> history if necessary.