On 13May2022 0233, Phil Pugliese - philpugliese at yahoo.com (via tml
list) wrote:
>   In my experience it's the custom of 'interspersed inserts' (a holdover from the old USENET newslists) that causes the main problem.
> Once a post gets too long it's hard to find all the different 'sub-threads'.
> Bottom posting went out-of-style essentially cuz' there was still the same old problems when a post got too long along w/ the hassle of going all the way to the bottom to get to the new stuff.
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
The big change occurred when Microsoft made Outlook place the cursor in
replies at the top, and you couldn't change that behaviour in the
settings. Heck, one version even resisted moving the cursor below the
quoted material by hand. As it became the business standard, and people
are lazy, replying at the top became the norm and other email clients
(such as the one Netscape bundled with their browser, which was the one
that started the whole thing with html in emails) started doing it too.
So I blame Microsoft for top replies, and both Microsoft (Outlook liked
to use rtf to format emails) and Netscape for the switch from plain text
for emails, with all the problems with embedded nasties that we have today.

--
Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>