Funny, you mention to him that he cross posted to 5 newsgroups but you failed to mention you did the same thing. :) Either way, this entire argument is pretty silly but it does make a few good points. The top posters do tend to drop a single line on top of many many lines of quoted text and often it's a stupid comment that has nothing to do with the topic. I prefer to trim the quoted text to the portions I wish to reply to and post my response directly after the quoted portion. I would refer to this as mixed posting but I'm sure there's someone out there that would banish it from the planet if they could.