It's insulting when you trim the message to a shorter statement that you are responding to. The other 18 lines may not have been important to this particular response but they were not content free.
If your content was in any way, interesting, then people will have read it in the message that you posted. I see no need to repeat a bunch of irrelevant text when I am only replying to one point in your email. Personally, I wish more people would trim away all the irrelevant junk when replying. On the other hand, in the corporate world I find that the habit of top posting is very useful to me. I often see things that were never intended to be sent to me and I often discover that the previous replies in a thread betray the fact that the writer did not read or did not understand the original message. But on a mailing list, trimmed replies are superior. --Michael Dillon P.S. are the standards of this list so unclear that Darcy and I have to discuss this? Who is right?