Top Posting

The arguments against email top posting have never swayed me.

 Wikipedia tells me top posting on newsgroups is bad and I believe them. I don't use newsgroups so I don't know about that posting style. I can see the point since both news readers and web interfaces (Google Groups) group the threads together by default. I assume the feature works pretty good in those cases.

There is an RFC saying "When replying to a message, include enough original material to be understood but no more. It is extremely bad form to simply reply to a message by including all the previous message: edit out all the irrelevant material." Seems the problem top posting is trying to solve is "that top-posters often word their replies on the assumption that you just read the previous message, even though their perversity has put it further down the page than you have yet read". For email this seems like a valid assumption to make. And, like Raymond Chen points out if you add people to a thread you had better tell them why and what you want them to do. Corollary, "don't forget to ask your question." So really people need to learn to communicate better?

Email clients top post by default. Inboxes are sorted in chronological order. GMail is awesome and groups conversations and hides the redundant parts. Grouping seems to work as long as the subject and/or some magical included ID doesn't get removed. But we all know cases that client grouping fails. Worse yet, someone(we know who you are) wants to email you so they reply to any old email lying around with your name on it.

Every professional I have ever seen top posts. They seem to like having the entire email should I want to see it or forward the entire thread to some one. And don't get me wrong, quoting relevant portions in a top post, or inline responses are still good practices. This person, although not a fan, points out the benefits of Top Posting in a business setting. (See When Does Top Posting Make Sense?)

Since I spend most of my time in a business setting where top posting helps so I will keep going. We stopped being worried about the number of bits being transmitted and stored 10 years ago. Top posting can't be that confusing and at least in business the benefits outweigh the negligible costs.
7/10/08 Edit
EmailReplies.com agrees with me too.