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.


-- 
Steve