thumperward wrote:Secondly, the issue (once again) is of allowing one's signature to appear above quoted text. This is a problem because:
1. It means that stripping everything below a signature line from a quoted mail is impossible because that would destroy the preserved thread.
2. It requires the receiver to read below the footer of the mail (the signature) to retrieve thread information. Further, as the thread is bottomquoted it reads in reverse order.
3. As stripping sigs is impossible, a quoted thread will contain dozens of signatures.
It strikes me that much of the reason why some folks don't see the utility of bottom quoting can be seen in the quoted text above. Specifically, there is a built-in but unspoken assumption there that the "typical" use of Thunderbird will be for long, threaded discussions. In these cases, it's critical to be able to retrieve the context of the discussion, so bottom-quoting is frowned upon.
However, I would contend that many people have an alternate usage pattern in mind, and these are the people who would favor bottom-quoting. These are people who want to use Thunderbird the way most typical business users use Outlook -- for short e-mail discussions. In this use case support for context preservation isn't terribly important, since odds are you are only one or two messages out from the start of the "thread". This also means sig-stripping isn't as critical in this case, since you'll at most build up a couple of sigs rather than dozens. What _is_ critical for this user, though, is that their contact info and "branding" information, which they typically store in their sig, be in a place where the recipient of their message can see it easily rather than buried after a bunch of quoted text.
Since one can construct a plausible Thunderbird use case for each approach, it would seem best for this to be an option, perhaps settable on a per-account basis (so Usenet accounts can be set differently than one's business e-mail). It does seem, however, that some folks see this more as a religious issue than a usability issue, so it's unclear whether said option will materialize, no matter how much sense it makes.
As such I appoligize if I came across as a jerk in my previous messages)