When I reply to an email, I put my reply below the quoted text, but my friend puts his above. Who is right?

Two contrasting schools of thought can turn the theoretically simple act of corresponding by email into a bewildering screenful of conversational threads thrown into disarray. Reader Bernard Martin is firmly on the side of those who reply at the top of the email: “Why,” he ponders, “would you want the reader to have to scroll down in order to read your bons mots?” Kate McEvoy, by contrast, chides top-posters for their inability to edit the message they’re responding to. “It means that each email gets increasingly lengthy, and they’re full of those disclaimers that are appended by companies every time an email is sent.”

Kate’s stance on ‘netiquette’ stems from rules developed by people posting on Usenet, the long-running Internet discussion system, where you were expected to quote any relevant bits of the message and then add your responses directly underneath each bit, creating a conversational thread. This kept each message concise, to the point and – importantly, in the days before broadband – quick to download. In business emails, a concurrent trend developed to just stick your reply at the top; this was not only less arduous, but also had the positive side-effect of preserving a full copy of the whole exchange within each message. These days, webmail services such as Hotmail and GMail automatically stick the insertion point at the top of your reply, and the righteous fury of veteran internet users who loathe top-posting is slowly giving way to reluctant acceptance. “Rather than fight it,” writes Tom Evans, “It’s just become easier going along with it.”

A book by Will Schwalbe called “Send: The How, Why, When and When Not Of Email” recently made its way onto the bestseller lists in the USA, and your replies confirmed a widespread irritation at other cardinal sins of email: messages formatted with HTML to contain lurid text and tasteless fonts; gigantic picture attachments; bellowing emails written in capital letters; use of emoticons such as to inject light-heartedness into a conversation; and the over-use of the cc: and bcc: fields, causing us to receive emails that we never really needed to read. In terms of personal correspondence, the above could all be deemed mildly irritating, but in business the consequences are more serious, as Mike Dodson from email technology company Mirapoint firmly believes. “Employees must be made aware,” he says, “that undisciplined and incompetent emailing is as much of a disciplinary issue as visiting banned websites.” So, if you are at the office, it might well pay to think twice before you press “send”.