Q: Why is top-posting such a bad ting?

A: Top posting.

Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

I belong to a lot of mailing lists who’s members demand no top postingbe allowed in the list. I do follow this rule but it is made sometimes a bit annoying since most everyone else I email get absolutely lost when trying to read a bottom-posted reply. Because many of these people are family (my father being one of them) I am not about to insist they learn how to read and reply using bottom posting. So with a normal email client I would configure one or the other and try to remember to re-place my cursor when having to reply using the opposite method.

But along comes my favorite new piece of software, Claws Mail, which allows me to set up both, making life much more efficient. Now this set up isn’t difficult, but it’s not as simple as clicking an option. With that said, let’s set about to make Claws Mail aware of when you need top or bottom posting.

Directing to folders

The first thing to do is to create a folder where you will direct all of your email from a mailing list. I get a lot of email from both the Fedora Users mailing list and the Ubuntu Users mailing list. I create a folder for each of these (Fedora and Ubuntu respectively). To create the folders right click on the top-most folder (most likely called Mailbox) and select Create New Folder. Create however many folders you need for your mailing lists.

Filter the messages

The next step is to create a filter for each mailing list that will direct all email to the correct folder. To create the filter right-click an email from one of the mailing lists and then select Create Filter Rule and then select the “By To” entry. When you create the filter make sure you set it up so that all mail that match this rule is moved to the folder you created for the list.

Once you have created all the rules you need to make sure your mailing list email is automatically moved to the correct folder you can have Claws Mail move all of the email already in your inbox by going to the Tools menu and selecting “Filter all messages in folder”. This will move everything to the right folder. If you need more information on creating a filter check out my article “Create message filters in Claws Mail.”

Create a template

Now if you right click on the folder you created for the mailing list select the Properties entry. Within this window you will see the Templates section. Click on this and then on the Reply tab. You can now create a reply template specific to this folder (see my “Customize your replies with Claws Mail templates” article for more information on creating a template.) For the mailing list replies you will want to place the cursor at the bottom of the post (after the quoted text).

Now when you reply to an email within that folder it will follow the setup of the template. And if you have your regular preference templates set up so the cursor is placed prior to the quoted text your email life will have been made easier.

The Claws Mail template feature allows you to create specific templates that format your email in precisely the way you want them. Your compositions, your replies, and your forwards can leave your PC laid out exactly the way you want them. And it doesn’t take a programmer or guru to set templates up. You just have to understand the strings used by Claws Mail that allow you to insert specific, pre-configured fields into the body of your email.

Figure 1

You can create templates within one of two windows: “Preferences for current account” or “Preferences” (the former only configures templates for the account being used and the latter configures templates globally). Both of these windows can be opened from within the Configuration menu. Once in either of these windows go to the Templates section where you will find  three tabs (see Figure 1): Compose, Reply, and Forward. The first thing you must do is decide what type of template you want to create. Most often people use the Reply template so they can format how they want their replies to look.

As you can see, in Figure 1, I have already created a template. The template I have created does this when I reply to an email:

The first line of the reply reads In a recent email ORIGINAL_SENDER said the following:

QUOTED_EMAIL

to this REPLY_SENDER says:

BODY_OF_REPLY

A: Because it makes understanding the conversation harder?
Q: What is wrong with top posting?

• Where ORIGINAL_SENDER is who the email came from.
• Where QUOTED_EMAIL is the quoted text of the email you are replying to.
• Where REPLY_SENDER is the full name of the user replying.
• Where BODY_OF_REPLY is the text written in the reply.

You will also notice a bit of snarkiness at the end. ;-)

To achieve this layout I used the following pre-defined tags:

• %N – Original sender.
• \n – New line marker.
• %Q – Quoted message body.
• %af – Full name of sender (me).
• %X – Cursor position.

The %X tag is one of the most interesting of the tags. It is with this tag you define where you want your cursor to be placed when you begin the email. Because Claws Mail defaults to bottom posting, and has no means to change this to top posting, you have to define top posting by using the %X tag. So if I want to always top post in my replies I would create a reply template like this:

%X\n
Is my reply to an email sent by %N, that said:\n
%Q

To get a full list of all the possible tags to use click the Information button inside of the Templates configuration window. You will also notice you can use regular expressions in your templates. The possibilites abound!

Final thoughts

Once you start using templates in Claws Mail you will really begin to see how flexible this application is. Once I started using templates I never looked back to Thunderbird. Have you created a cool template for Claws Mail? If so, share it with your fellow Ghacks readers.