Mark Bannister wrote:

More and more groups I have noticed seem to be using top posting. I try

More and more groups have members with people who couldn't care less, and
simply use whatever form their news reader provides as a default.

to adhere to the group's desires, but find top posting much easier to
deal with and in-line ("inline", "in line" ?) posting for when it makes
sense. Top posting is faster to read if you follow a group consistently.

I beg to differ. I read extremely well, but I read a huge amount of online
postings (typically 100 emails per day - after filtering spam - and 1-200
news postings). You can't keep all those threads straight with
top-posting. fwiw, I would have said "inline" but my spell-check dislikes
it. Definitely "in-line" rather than "in line".

Bottom posting works better for the occasional user, but I have found

Bottom posting is _never_ right, except in the trivial case where it's
indistinguishable from in-line posting.

newsgroups but 99% of my email replies back and forth are top posted and
I do a lot of work by email with a broad range of companies.

99% of my email correspondence (as opposed to mailing lists) is also
top-posted. Partly, that's different because we really _are_ having a
conversation - business email (unfortunately) holds my attention more than
a rec.ponds thread - and I _never_ edit business correspondence anyway. We
keep the last message in a thread as the entire history of the
correspondence. Partly it's because my business correspondence is
generally conducted via MS Outlook which has _no_ usable facility for
in-line posting. It frequently irritates me that I can't easily respond to
a question point-by-point.

Some folks are quite touchy about it of course.

Oh, yeah?? Says who? :-)
--
derek