Rated 5 out of 5 stars

by SilverSage on Feb. 10, 2010 · permalink

I don't know why everyone is complaining about the developer or the extension. This extension does exactly what it's supposed to do, and that is to comply with the IETF's RFC 1845. It supports text sig blocks and also more complex HTML sig blocks the way I would expect it to support them. In other words, it works.

Regardless of what people think about this extension not supporting top posting, it works as it was intended to work and, for the most part, works well. You shouldn't drop your rating because you don't like bottom posting. After all, bottom posting is still the Internet e-mail standard. Suppose you like interleaved posting. Are you going to rate this extension lower because it doesn't support interleaved posting? Interleaved posting, just like top posting, isn't part of RFC 1845, either.

I'm not sure about this, but I believe top posting was propagated by Outlook and it top posted due to a bug, not by design. Imagine buggy software coming from Micro$oft!

Be that as it may, I think most people top post because that is the way Outlook worked and they got used to it. Plain and simple.

An RFC is not a standard. It's a recommendation. So maybe this developer is a little opinionated. The fact of the matter is that, in Internet e-mail parlance, a signature always appears at the very end of an e-mail and is always preceded by two dashes followed by a new line code. E-mail servers, if configured properly, recognize the double dash followed by a new line code as the beginning of a signature block, or the beginning of the end of an e-mail.

The developer could, if he wanted, support top posting by developing code that would insert a signature block without prepending two dashes followed by a new line code, perhaps prepending only a blank line or some other codes (like a double equal sign or double tilde) that an e-mail server would not interpret as a true signature block. That is how Evolution, the Mac version of Outlook developers chose to implement top posting. He could also support interleaved posting, too, if he were so inclined. It probably wouldn't be too much more difficult to write that logic than the logic to support top posting.

Many of the IETF's RFCs were written in the early-to-mid 1990s when many people used dial-up and people paid their ISPs by the minute. It was more efficient to read e-mails from top-to-bottom because the natural flow was preserved by bottom posting. Corporate America uses top posting partly because of Outlook's bug but also because the most recent and relevant information appears at the top of a business e-mail; if someone needs to know the history of the communication, he or she knows enough to read the e-mail from the bottom up. There's really no big deal.

Not that my opinion means anything, but I think many of the IETF's RFCs that date back to the "beginning" of the general public's use of the Internet need to be revisited, especially those that make recommendations for Internet e-mail.

Maybe Achim will read this review and have second thoughts about his stance... and, then again, maybe he won't.