Posting style

"Top-posting" can also refer to the practice of re-posting a message so that it appears at the top of a list for visibility. See bumping.

When a message is replied to in e-mail, Internet forums, or Usenet, the original can often be included, or "quoted", in a variety of different posting styles.

The main options are top-posting — replying above the original message; bottom-posting — replying below; or interleaved posting. While each online community differs on which styles are appropriate or acceptable, within any community the use of the "wrong" method risks being seen as a major breach of netiquette, and can provoke vehement response from community regulars.

Styles

Top-posting

This method includes the entire parent message (and usually previous messages) verbatim with the reply appended above it:

No problems.  6pm it is then.
Jim

At 10.01am Wednesday, Danny wrote: 
 
> Whoa!  Hold on.  I have job scheduled at 5:30 which mails out 
> a report to key tech staff.  Can you not push it back an hour?
> Danny
> 
> At 9.40am Wednesday, Jim wrote,   
> > I'm going to suspend the mail service for approx. thirty
> > minutes tonight, starting at 5pm, to install some updates 
> > and important fixes.
> > Jim 

This style of posting resembles forwarding messages with new text appended at the top:

Hello A.B. !

Here is the relevant portion of the letter that X.Z.
sent to our group, as requested.

Yours,
N.N.

On Wednesday, X.Y. wrote, 
> Hi, team!
> 
> Please work on portions 5 and 9 for Friday.  The customer says 
> the rest isn't critical, as they mention below.
> 
> Thanks,
> X.Z.
> 
> On Monday, Customer wrote:  
> > Dear Sir,
> > 
> > We will need to have the new doohicky method implemented, as well 
> > as the heffalump output.  We really need this by Friday, and if
> > your team needs to shift focus to achieve those two deliverables,
> > we can wait until afterward for the remainder of the work.
> > 
> > Thank you,
> > J. Customer 

The entire message is responded to with another full-length message, similar to traditional written correspondence except that the response includes the original message. While top-posting is sometimes recommended against, it is the more common style in business email correspondence. Customer service email practices often require that all points be addressed in a clear manner without quoting, while the original e-mail message may be included as an attachment merely as evidence.

One benefit of the style is that when a new correspondent is included in an otherwise private discussion (due to forwarding or addition of new recipients), the background of the discussion, or "thread", is also accessible, with the most recent response immediately visible at the top. Especially in business correspondence, an entire message thread may need to be forwarded to a third party for handling or discussion. In this case, it is appropriate to "top-post" the handling instructions or handoff discussion above the quoted trail of the entire discussion — as the intention is simply to "approve" or "provide instruction", not to respond in a point by point manner — or to send a copy of all the emails comprised by the discussion. (In environments where the entire discussion is public, like newsgroups or online forums, inclusion of past discussion is not necessary, and trim-posting is sufficient.)

Email has long supported a convention for forwarding verbatim entire messages, including their headers. 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 email, rather than a quote.) These forwarded messages are displayed in the same way as top-posting in some mail clients.

The default quote format and cursor placement of many popular e-mail applications, such as Microsoft Outlook and Gmail, encourages top-posting. Microsoft has had a significant influence on top-posting by the ubiquity of its software; its e-mail and newsreader software places the cursor at the top by default, and in several cases makes it difficult not to top-post (this is caused by a bug present on most flavours of Microsoft Outlook where the quotation symbols are lost when replying in plain text to a message that was originally sent in HTML/RTF, along with the fact that on the default Microsoft Outlook setup, no quotation symbols are generated at all — this makes it very hard to distinguish between new and quoted text); many users have accepted this as a de facto standard. In addition, users of mobile devices, like BlackBerries, are encouraged to use top-posting, because the devices 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 Blackberry user.

Partially because of Microsoft's influence, top-posting is more common on mailing lists and in personal e-mail. 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. Objections to top-posting on newsgroups, as a rule, seem to come from persons who first went online in the earlier days of Usenet, and in communities that date to Usenet's early days. Among the most vehement communities are those in the Usenet comp.lang hierarchy, especially comp.lang.c and comp.lang.c++. Etiquette is looser (as is almost everything) in the alt hierarchy. Newer online participants, especially those with limited experience of Usenet, tend to be less sensitive to arguments about posting style.

It may be that users used to older, terminal-oriented software which was unable to easily show references to posts being replied to, learned to prefer the summary that not top-posting gives; it is also likely that the general slower propagation times of the original Usenet groups made that summary a useful reminder of older posts. As news and mail readers have become more capable, and as propagation times have grown shorter, newer users may find top-posting more efficient.

Some maintain that top-posting is never appropriate, and refer to it jokingly as the "TOFU" method (from the German "text oben, fullquote unten", sometimes translated "text over, fullquote under") or "jeopardy-style quoting" (alluding to game show Jeopardy!, in which contestants compete to give the correct question to a given answer). The following is a common succinct example used to criticize top-posting, very often used in signature blocks:

A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

Bottom-posting

Another style of replying to messages has been dubbed "bottom-posting". The reply is placed below the quote to preserve the logical order of the replies and follow the Western reading direction from top to bottom.

This is typically done when only a single portion of the previous message is being replied to; the rest of the quoted material is trimmed.

> > At 9.40am Wednesday, Jim wrote,
> > I'm going to suspend the mail service for approx. thirty
> > minutes tonight, starting at 5pm, to install some updates 
> > and important fixes. 
> 
> At 10.01am Wednesday, Danny wrote:
> Whoa!  Hold on.  I have job scheduled at 5:30 which mails out 
> a report to key tech staff.  Can you not push it back an hour?

No problems.  6pm it is then.

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 here), this is not so much of an issue any more.

Inline replying

In practice, "bottom-posting" is usually extended to "inline replying" (or "interleaved reply" or "point-by-point rebuttal", though it is sometimes also called "bottom-posting"), where chunks of quoted material and subsequent replies are interleaved, giving a specific response to each paragraph or sentence. This creates a natural, chronological ordering to each segment of the discussion stored within a message. It is not required for the poster to paraphrase each issue being addressed, as comments can be made point-for-point against the exact quote of the original message, making for a more structured, disciplined and unambiguous reply.

This style of posting is frequent on Usenet, Internet forums, and other situations in which the previous discussion is publicly available. This is also sometimes used in email.

Inline replies keep related sections of a discussion together within a message. As such it is easier to fork off parallel 'threads' of discussion from a single source message, each perhaps dealing with only one specific point (or subset of points) from the original.

If quoting large sections of discussion, particularly in newsgroup discussions, it is recommended to trim the message such that only a taste of the original (a reminder) is left — even if this means leaving a sentence hanging. The chunks of quoted text are typically "trimmed" (leaving only the relevant quoted material), and some refer to this style as "trim-posting". Paragraphs which are not replied to are frequently "snipped" completely. In such a circumstance it is customary to append an indicator, usually in the form of a square bracketed tag to the effect of [snipped], [trimmed], or simply [...]. This also prevents signature blocks, free email service ads, and corporate disclaimers from piling up in a growing useless "tail" at the end.

If the precise nature of the quote is not immediately apparent from the remaining text, it is polite to include a brief 'subject' text in the bracket, so the original author's words are not misunderstood by readers unfamiliar with the original.

> On Thursday, Jim wrote:
> When considering the variation in style between the original
> novel and the movie adaptation, it is clear to see that 
[snipped...]

Yes, but almost twenty years separates the book and the film.


> The movie clearly adds a sense of menace to the story which
> is not present in the original book.  This is unacceptable 
[Darker interpretation pros and cons, trimmed...]

I agree.  The darker tone works well, once one understands 
the two are aimed at different audiences.

When the technique of doing a point-by-point reply beneath the text of an original document is applied to news articles, it is known as fisking.

Double-quoting

Another style involves replying in an interleaved manner to selected quotes from the original message, as described above, but then following this with a fullquote of the entire message, as if top-posting. This results in some portions of the original message being quoted twice, which is considered wasteful.

Netiquette Guidelines

In the words of RFC 1855, the RFC Netiquette Guidelines, which comprise a comprehensive set of voluntary netiquette conventions:

If you are sending a reply to a message or a posting be sure you summarize the original at the top of the message, or include just enough text of the original to give a context. This will make sure readers understand when they start to read your response.

This section of the RFC is discussing public archived postings such as mailing lists and newsgroups. For interpersonal e-mail, the subject line is often sufficient to remind the sender of what was being discussed, and no quoting of any type is necessary to indicate a reply. However, if one is politely addressing points of a conversation, the points discussed should be explicitly stated or quoted inline. This is stated in the RFC regarding interpersonal communication such as email:

When replying to a message, include enough original material to be understood but no more. It is extremely bad form to simply reply to a message by including all the previous message: edit out all the irrelevant material.

Some would add that one should also include a blank line in between quoted material and responses to ensure that they are clearly set off from one another. Some mail programs may even try to re-word-wrap entire paragraphs and cause quotes and replies to be jumbled together illegibly if they are not cleanly separated. A common mistake is to leave "tails" of greater-than signs (">") above or below a quoted block, running into the preceding or following paragraph of new material, instead of creating an entirely blank line as a separator.

Attribution lines

Since quoted material frequently becomes several levels deep, if a relevant point is retained during a discussion, "attribution lines" are commonly used to indicate the author of each part of the quoted material.

> > Alfred Bartosz wrote:
> > > Do you like top-posting?

> Nancy Nguyen wrote:
> > No. 

Alfred Bartosz wrote:
> How come?

Because it messes up the flow of reading.

> What do you do instead?

I prefer to reply inline.

Many mail user agents will add these attribution lines automatically to the top of the quoted material. Retaining these lines as the discussion continues results in this style:

Alfred Bartosz wrote:
> Nancy Nguyen wrote:
> > Alfred Bartosz wrote:
> > > Do you like top-posting?
> > No.
> How come?

Because it messes up the flow of reading.

> What do you do instead?

I prefer to reply inline.

External links

• RFC 1855 — Netiquette Guidelines
• Rules to Better Email
• Dan's Mail Format Site: Quoting
• top-post in jargon dictionary
• Quoting Style How to use quote correctly using interleaved quoting instead of top-posting
• Why is Bottom-posting better than Top-posting
• In Defence of Top-Posting
• Shooting yourself in the foot (or head): One round in the bottom- vs. top-posting war — Blog post
• post is post, but it depends on the definition of is — Blog post
• Outlook Quotefix, Outlook Express Quotefix and OE PowerTool — third party utilities for automatically reformatting quoted text in Microsoft mail products
• The Trim-Posting Manifesto
• Using Internet e-mail
• This Yahoo Groups archived message shows an entire digest being quoted back, and quoted back again, ironically including pro- and anti-top-posting debate