Interleaved style In the interleaved reply style (also called "inline reply", "interlined reply", "point-by-point rebuttal", or, sometimes, "bottom posting"), the original message is broken into two or more sections, each followed by a specific reply or comment. A reply in inline style may also include some
top-posted or
bottom-posted comments that apply to the whole reply message, rather than to a specific point. For example: I have been following the discussion about the new product line. Here are my thoughts. Joe wrote: > Will our prices be competitive? That may not be a problem for now, we still have a quality edge. > We do not have enough trained people on the West Coast. We have many > new employees but they do not know our products yet. We can bring them here for a crash training course. Mary wrote: > We still do not have a clear marketing plan. Peter, would you take charge of that? Let me know if you need help. On the whole, I am quite optimistic. It looks like we will be shipping the basic system before the end of this quarter. Nancy The interleaved reply style can also be combined with top-posting: selected points are quoted and replied to, as above, and then a full copy of the original message is appended. > Can you present your report an hour later? Yes I can. The summary will be sent no later than 5pm. Jim At 10.01am Wednesday, Danny wrote: >> 2.00pm: Present report > Jim, I have a meeting at that time. Can you present your report an hour later? > >> 4.30pm: Send out summary of feedback > Also if you do the above, this may need to happen later too. > Danny > > At 9.40am Wednesday, Jim wrote: >> My schedule for today will be: >> 10.00am: Gather data for report >> 2.00pm: Present report to team >> 4.30pm: Send out summary of feedback >> Jim Interleaving was the predominant reply style in the
Usenet discussion lists, years before the existence of the
WWW and the spread of
e-mail and the
Internet outside the academic community. Interleaving was also common originally in e-mail, because many internet users had been exposed to Usenet newsgroups and other
Internet forums, where it is still used. The style became less common for email after the opening of the internet to commercial and non-academic personal use. One possible reason is the large number of casual e-mail users that entered the scene at that time. Another possible reason is the inadequate support provided by the reply function of some
webmail readers, which either do not automatically insert a copy of the original message into the reply, or do so without any quoting prefix
level indicators. Finally, most forums, wiki discussion pages, and
blogs (such as
Slashdot) essentially impose the bottom-post format, by displaying all recent messages in chronological order. Interleaving continues to be used on technical mailing lists where clarity within complex threads is important.
Top-posting In
top-posting style, the original message is included verbatim, with the reply above it. It is sometimes referred to by the acronym
TOFU ("text over, fullquote under"). It has also been colloquially referred to as
Jeopardy! reply style: as in the game show's signature clue/response format, the answers precede the question. Example: No problem. 6pm it is then. Jim -------- Original Message --------
From: Danny
Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2007 10:01 AM
To: Jim
Subject: RE: Job Whoa! Hold on. I have a job scheduled at 5:30 which mails out a report to key tech staff. Could you please push it back an hour? Danny -------- Original Message --------
From: Jim
Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2007 9:40 AM
To: Danny
Subject: Job I'm going to suspend the mail service for approx. thirty minutes tonight, starting at 5pm, to install some updates and important fixes. Jim Top-posting preserves an apparently unmodified transcript of a branch in the conversation. Often all replies line up in a single branch of a conversation. The top of the text shows the latest replies. This appears to be advantageous for business correspondence, where an e-mail thread can dupe others into believing it is an "official" record. By contrast, excessive indentation of interleaved and bottom posting may turn difficult to interpret. If the participants have different stature such as manager vs. employee or consultant vs. client, one person's cutting apart another person's words without the full context may look impolite or cause misunderstanding. In the earlier days of
Usenet informal discussions where everyone was an equal encouraged bottom-posting. Until the mid-1990s, posts in a net.newcomers newsgroup insisted on interleaving replies. Usenet
comp.lang hierarchy, especially comp.lang.c and comp.lang.c++ insisted on the same as of the 2010s. The
alt hierarchy tolerated top-posting. Newer online participants, especially those with limited experience of Usenet, tend to be less sensitive to arguments about posting style. Top-posting can be problematic on mailing lists with ongoing discussions which eventually require someone to act on the top-posted material. For example, top-posting "Those changes look ok to me, go ahead and make them" can be very inconvenient, as readers may need to read through a long email trail to know which changes the top-poster is referring to. Inter-leaving the text directly below the text describing the changes is much more convenient in these cases. Users of
mobile devices, like
smartphones, are encouraged to use top-posting because the devices may only download the beginning of a message for viewing. The rest of the message is only retrieved when needed, which takes additional download time. Putting the relevant content at the beginning of the message requires less bandwidth, less time, and less scrolling for the user. Top-posting is a natural consequence of the behavior of the "reply" function in many current e-mail readers, such as
Microsoft Outlook,
Gmail, and others. By default, these programs insert into the reply message a copy of the original message (without headers and often without any extra indentation or quotation markers), and position the editing
cursor above it. Moreover, a bug present on most flavours of Microsoft Outlook caused the quotation markers to be lost when replying in plain text to a message that was originally sent in HTML/RTF. For these and possibly other reasons, many users seem to accept top-posting as the "standard" reply style. Partially because of Microsoft's influence, top-posting is very common on
mailing lists and in personal e-mail. Especially in business correspondence, an entire message thread may need to be forwarded to a third party for handling or discussion. On the other hand, in environments where the entire discussion is accessible to new readers (such as
newsgroups or
online forums), full inclusion of previous messages is inappropriate; if quoting is necessary, the interleaved style is probably best. If the original message is to be quoted in full, for any reason, bottom-posting is usually the most appropriate format—because it preserves the logical order of the replies and is consistent with the Western reading direction from top to bottom. It is not uncommon during discussions concerning top-posting vs. bottom-posting to hear quotes from "Netiquette Guidelines (RFC 1855)". While many RFCs are vetted and approved though a committee process, some RFCs, such as RFC 1855, are just "Informational" and in reality, sometimes just personal opinions. (Additional information on "Informational" RFCs can be found in RFC 2026, under "4.2.2 Informational" and "4.2.3 Procedures for Experimental and Informational RFCs".) The nature of RFC 1855 should be considered while reading the following discussion. According to RFC 1855, a message can begin with an abbreviated summary; i.e. a post can begin with a paraphrasing instead of quoting selectively. Specifically, it says: Interleaved reply combined with top-posting combines the advantages of both styles. However this also results in some portions of the original message being quoted twice, which takes up extra space and may confuse the reader. In forwarding it is sometimes preferred to include the entire original message (including all headers) as a
MIME attachment, while in top-posted replies these are often trimmed or replaced by an
attribution line. An untrimmed quoted message is a weaker form of transcript, as key pieces of meta information are destroyed. (This is why an
ISP's
Postmaster will typically insist on a
forwarded copy of any problematic e-mail, rather than a quote.) These forwarded messages are displayed in the same way as top-posting in some mail clients. Top-posting is viewed as seriously destructive to
mailing-list digests, where multiple levels of top-posting are difficult to skip. The worst case would be top-posting while including an entire digest as the original message. Some believe that "top-posting" is appropriate for interpersonal e-mail, but inline posting should always be applied to threaded discussions such as newsgroups. This example is occasionally used in mailing lists to mock and discourage top-posting: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Why is top-posting such a bad thing? Top-posting. What is the most annoying thing in e-mail? Bottom-posting preserves the logical order of the replies and is consistent with the Western reading direction from top to bottom. The major argument against bottom-posting is that scrolling down through a post to find a reply is inconvenient, especially for short replies to long messages, and many inexperienced computer users may not know that they need to scroll down to find a reply to their query. When sending an untrimmed bottom-posted message, one might indicate inline replies with a notice at the top such as "I have replied below." However, as many modern mail programs are capable of displaying different levels of quotation with different colors (as seen in the
bottom-posting example on this page), this is not so much of an issue any more. Another method to indicate that there is more reply text still to come is to always end your text with a signature line. Then a reader who is familiar with your reply style will know to continue to read until your signature line appears. This method is particularly polite and useful when using the inline reply method, since it tells the reader that your response is complete at the point where your signature line appears.
Quoting support in popular mail clients This widespread policy in business communication made bottom and inline posting so unknown among most users that some of the most popular email programs no longer support the traditional posting style. For example, Microsoft Outlook (when replying to an HTML message), AOL, and Yahoo! make it difficult or impossible to indicate which part of a message is the quoted original or do not let users insert comments between parts of the original. When replying to a plain text message with Microsoft Outlook when configured to plain text mode however, Outlook properly uses Quoted line markers allowing for easy insertion of comments between parts of the original. Unfortunately however, the default mode is HTML and few users bother to change the default settings. Yahoo! does not have the option "Quote the text of the original message" in Mail Classic, but this setting is retained after turning it on in All-New Mail and then switching back to Mail Classic. Inline replying is broken in Microsoft Outlook, which despite choosing the setting to prefix each line of the original with the "greater-than" character (>) produces a blue line that makes answers inserted between quotes of an
HTML email look like part of the original. The workarounds are to use the setting "read all standard mail in plain text", or to use the "Edit Message" option on the original email and convert it to plain text before replying (then discard the edited version). ==See also==