It never ceases to amaze me how poorly business communications are handled and how badly businesses' #1 tool of communication supports, or rather doesn't support, good communication. Case in point:
I believe you are talking about how I use interleaved posting. Wikipedia has a good article on this: Posting Style and I find the following blog posting about Top Posting, convincing:
A: Because we read from top to bottom, left to right.
Q: Why should I start my reply below the quoted text?
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: The lost context.
Q: What makes top-posted replies harder to read than bottom-posted?
A: Yes.
Q: Should I trim down the quoted part of an email to which I'm replying?
Read normally, top to bottom and left to right, this makes little sense. Reading this from the bottom up you get the meaning. How do you guys do it? How do you keep track and parse such long email chains I have no idea!
Unfortunately Outlook does not make this easier. As the Wikipedia article states:
Quoting support in popular mail clients
This widespread policy in business communication [top posting only] made bottom and inline posting so unknown among most users that some of the most popular email programs no longer support the traditional posting style. For example Microsoft Outlook, AOL, and Yahoo! make it difficult or impossible to indicate which part of a message is the quoted original or do not let users insert comments between parts of the original.
Here's how it looks to me:
Which is quite readable. I had tried to help Outlook users by including CSS code in my responses to replicate the quote bars you see above, but somewhere around Outlook 2007 or so Outlook broke it and no longer honors <blockquote type=cite> citations and I gave up.
