Thank you for the lecture, but I was looking for useful information.
	My personal preference is to inter-post, but I know that others have 
different views.  If a mailing list explicitly requests that their users top 
or bottom post, according to you I should violate their standards?

On 2016-11-28 19:43:36 Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 28, 2016 at 03:55:06PM -0600, Leslie Turriff wrote:
> > 	Is there a way to tell kmail to do this?
>
> You shouldn't be bottom-posting any more than you should be top-posting.
> It is extremely frustrating for your readers to have to scroll past five
> or ten pages of quoted text to find a single line
>
> "I agree!!!"
>
> at the very bottom. And I'm not exaggerating, not even a little bit.
> I've seen this happen, many times. If I remember correctly, the worst
> case I bothered to count was *thirty-five pages*, from someone bottom-
> posting on a mailing list digest.
>
> Interleaved, in-line posting is best for extended discussions. Top-
> posting (as hated in Linux/Unix circles as it is) is good for short
> replies that don't lead to a long extended discussion. But bottom-
> posting is awful: it has all the disadvantages of top-posting, with none
> of the advantages.
>
> I'm running KMail 1.9 from KDE 3.5 (gosh, that's over a decade old!),
> and it defaults to quoting the replied message and putting the insertion
> point | at the front of the first quoted line, something like this:
>
>     On Monday, John Doe wrote:
>    |> blah blah blah blah
>    |>
>     > blah blah blah
>     >
>     > blah blah
>
> For in-line posting, it is the writer's responsibility to move the
> insertion point to where they want to insert a comment, trimming any
> old commented text which no longer relevant. Kmail cannot do that for
> you: it can't tell where you want to start typing.
>
> If you go to the menu
>
> Settings > Configure KMail...
>
> then click the Composer icon, you may find something relevant.