philblog tells about how Mozilla Thunderbird has its default reply position at the bottom of the email.
It bugged me too. Here’s what he said about it:
Apparently replying at the bottom of an e-mail is not an acceptable practice because I seemed to have either confused, annoyed, irritated, or all three, several people by doing so. After a few e-mails and instant messages from people I figured I would check to find out if there was a way to change this. After a brief Google search I found the solution to setting the reply position on e-mails to the top instead of the bottom.
# In Thunderbird: Go to “Account Settings”
# Select “Composition & Addressing” for the account in question
# Check the checkbox in the Composition group that says “Automatically quote the original message when replying”.
# Once the combo box below is enabled select the option “Start my reply above the quote”
That did the trick. If you use Thunderbird, or are going to try it: do this!
Thanks for the tip - was very puzzling (although I can also understand the logic of having the history first!
C
2006_05_04
Thanks, it worked for me.
gb
THANKS!!
I’ve never understood why anyone would ever want to put their reply to an e-mail at the bottom. I sent it to you…I should have a decent idea about what’s in it. Having it for reference is good as specifics might be lost in memory, but really putting my message at the top of a personal e-mail doesn’t sound that bright. I always wonder why they choose that as default…
Having the reply at the bottom of the E-Mail is mostly a carry-over of posting on Usenet newsgroups. Due to the scattered nature of Usenet, occasionally, posts would get lost, or ‘delayed’ on several, but not all servers. As a result, the response to a post, might be seen before the actual post itself.
Having the reply of a post, at the bottom allowed people to read the quoted (original) message first, before seeing the reply. It was more logical that way.
Of course, in the context of one on one email, it isn’t needed. However, the same problems that plagued Usenet posting, would also apply to multi-recipient e-mails. Soo.. what I’m getting at is…. that bottom-posting is the default on Thunderbird for a good reason