Thank you for the lecture, but I was looking for useful information. My personal preference is to inter-post, but I know that others have different views. If a mailing list explicitly requests that their users top or bottom post, according to you I should violate their standards?

On 2016-11-28 19:43:36 Steven D'Aprano wrote:

On Mon, Nov 28, 2016 at 03:55:06PM -0600, Leslie Turriff wrote:

...

Is there a way to tell kmail to do this?

You shouldn't be bottom-posting any more than you should be top-posting. It is extremely frustrating for your readers to have to scroll past five or ten pages of quoted text to find a single line

"I agree!!!"

at the very bottom. And I'm not exaggerating, not even a little bit. I've seen this happen, many times. If I remember correctly, the worst case I bothered to count was *thirty-five pages*, from someone bottom- posting on a mailing list digest.

Interleaved, in-line posting is best for extended discussions. Top- posting (as hated in Linux/Unix circles as it is) is good for short replies that don't lead to a long extended discussion. But bottom- posting is awful: it has all the disadvantages of top-posting, with none of the advantages.

I'm running KMail 1.9 from KDE 3.5 (gosh, that's over a decade old!), and it defaults to quoting the replied message and putting the insertion point | at the front of the first quoted line, something like this:

On Monday, John Doe wrote:

|> blah blah blah blah |> > blah blah blah > > blah blah

For in-line posting, it is the writer's responsibility to move the insertion point to where they want to insert a comment, trimming any old commented text which no longer relevant. Kmail cannot do that for you: it can't tell where you want to start typing.

If you go to the menu

Settings > Configure KMail...

then click the Composer icon, you may find something relevant.

On 2016-11-29 22:22:51 Steven D'Aprano wrote:

I don't think you're in a good position to be snarky at my "lecture".

...

I'm sorry that my old version of Kmail and I were unable to provide you

with the useful information you desired.

You didn't even try to provide an answer to my question; you assumed something about my situation and produced a lecture. If you had provided a meaningful answer to my question (it was "Is there a way to tell kmail to do this?") you probably would have gotten an answer like the one Stefan did. People who make irrelevant replies to requests for information deserve such responses, IMO, because they end up wasting the requestor's time as well as their own. Geez.

Steven D'Aprano wrote:

Top- posting (as hated in Linux/Unix circles as it is) is good for short replies that don't lead to a long extended discussion. But bottom- posting is awful: it has all the disadvantages of top-posting, with none of the advantages.

The whole point of quoting is to provide a frame of reference for the reply. The most effective way to do that is in a conversational quote precedes reply. The primary issue is selective VS mass/pointless quoting. In many cases, quoting a single relevant block of text from the parent post is plenty. It's too bad email clients don't work like some forums where you can highlight/quote/reply to a selected block of text.

...I have no idea of the specifics, but there are some email clients where that option is/can be automatically enabled when message text is highlighted prior to hitting reply, e.g. Thunderbird, Claws, OSX/iOS Mail. It was briefly a Gmail feature, then a Labs option, now?. I'd love to hear of others, I couldn't find any webmail clients with this option (surprising considering javascript/bookmarklets).