Concern

The multi-day rant about top-posting on Daring Fireball made me immediately think of Lotus Notes, the Retarded Stepchild of email clients.

Notes is one of those email clients that encourages, to an extreme degree, top-posting. It isn’t just that you get a blank line with your cursor above the whole quoted message, you instead get some mystery-meat document as the quotation, which includes various irrelevant headers, the person you’re quoting’s phone number and avatar picture, and has a disclosure triangle so you can collapse it. So an email thread exists as the entire conversation (no one ever deletes messages, because I don’t think anyone knows how to) in the wrong order. The cognitive flow is (no kidding) something like this:

Dood, STFU!

> Subject: RE: how to write email	From: Joe Briefcase
	To: Albert Luser

Because people read left-to-right, top-to-bottom.

> Subject: how to write email	From: Albert Luser
	To: Joe Briefcase

Why should I begin my reply at the bottom of a message?

Except in most cases the thread has grown to around 10 or 20 messages, and any and all attachments anyone has ever made to a message are preserved. I suppose having the entire thread quoted is kind of a plus, since Notes doesn’t yet have the advanced futuristic feature of organizing messages by thread, and it’s searching function is terrible, but at least it’s slow. It does, at least, let you quote the message with an “Internet-style reply” (wowee, that wild Intarweb I’ve been hearing about!) and write an email like a human being. I’ve recently been protesting Notes in my own little way, by always using Internet-style reply.

(This just reflects my own interaction with Notes. I’m sure it’s awesome for writing schemas and doing database shit with your email, or whatever, so this is from my own perspective as someone trying to sanely read email.)