As time went on, however, mail clients adapted. They learned (...)
I’ve heard the exact opposite! there was a hackernews post about this not too long ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22801233#22810132
The prevailing attitude was that top posting has won out precisely because modern mail clients did not have good features for threading, and as such new users did not get used to anything other than top posting.
We have mostly standardized on a new system, where mail clients default to including the full earlier message, and where they hide this quoted section by default.
I think top posting in mail has simply won out by sheer pressure of new users. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the default everywhere. Notice I’ve used bottom posting, or inline posting, in this comment (purposefully), and it seems natural. The context of messaging matters a lot.
I know I’m a bit late, but that sounds like something that could (up to a point) be reasonably automated.
Apart from flutrackers.com, are there other sites in a similar trend that should be bell-checked? has there been a previous effort to create a general alarm bell along the lines of these ideas?