[Python-ideas] Meta: Email netiquette

[Andrew Barnert]

On Jun 12, 2015, at 08:02, Ryan Gonzalez <rymg19 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> On June 12, 2015 8:14:47 AM CDT, anatoly techtonik <techtonik at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I would gladly use forum interface like http://www.discourse.org/
>> if there was any linked in message footers. Bottom posting is not
>> automated in Gmail and takes a lot of energy and dumb repeated
>> keypresses to complete.
> 
> Not really. I just did it right now.

And if that's too much work, there are Greasemonkey scripts to do it for you. (And, unlike Yahoo, Gmail doesn't seem to go out of their way to break user scripts every two weeks.)

But really, in non-trivial cases, you usually want your reply interleaved with parts of the original; just jumping to the very end of the message (past the signature and list footer) and replying to the whole thing in bulk isn't much better than top-posting. And, while some MUAs do have tools to help with that better than Gmail's, there's really no way to automate it; you have to put the effort into selecting the parts you want to keep or the parts you want to remove and putting your cursor after each one.

(If you're not willing to do that, and instead assume anyone who needs the context can reassemble it themselves with the help of an MUA with proper threading support--which is pretty much all of them today--then why quote at all?)