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> My message to you is right there in the same thread in my client. Don't send it back to me.

Dozens of times a day I add someone to the cc list when I'm replying to an email. I suspect most people that have an assistant (or are one, or collaborate with others in general) do this constantly.

It's an incredibly common use case. Should we all abandon this very common behavior in order to avoid your scorn?

> Dozens of times a day I add someone to the cc list

Incidentally, your daily dosage coincides with the amount of times I've had to do the same thing at all since I started using email some twenty five years ago.

> It's an incredibly common use case

For some, perhaps. On the other hand, I'd suggest that another, at least for me more common use case is to know exactly what is being replied to. Which is possible with proper quoting, rather than the let's-just-slap-on-your-entire-message-at-the-bottom-and-hope-you're-a-mind-reader nonsense.

Incredibly common use case:

1) Hi there I have a request for a meeting or phone call, or need something from your organization.

2) Great, I'm copying my assistant who will schedule this, or the other person in the company who knows the answer to your question, who I have now handed this task off to nearly instantly and seamlessly.

If you don't cc people all the time, I can't believe you've used email for any business purpose.

With inline quoting the relevant content of the conversation is immediately and easily discernible. You may Cc people with a whole copy of the thread, but IME nobody bothers reading through. For one thing, it's in reverse order so very difficult to follow.

OTOH, inline quoting was always destined to fail. It requires that you purposefully and carefully edit and reply in the appropriate places. That's asking too much of the vast majority of people. B

With inline quoting the relevant content of the conversation is immediately and easily discernible. You may Cc people with a whole copy of the thread at the bottom, but IME nobody bothers reading through. For one thing, it's in reverse order so very difficult to follow. It will also contain all the irrelevant parts of the discussion, which in a long thread will be the vast majority of the quote, thus making it even more burdensome to wade through. Part-and-parcel of inline quoting is pruning.

OTOH, inline quoting was always destined to fail. It requires that one purposefully and carefully edit the thread and reply in the appropriate place. That's asking too much of the vast majority of people. Perhaps it could have been preserved to a greater extent had Microsoft Outlook not effectively forced bottom quoting, but alas that ship sailed decades ago.

  --
  A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
  Q: Why is top posting frowned upon?
  A: Top-posting.
  Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in email?

I don't think that copying an entire email thread to someone is an effective way of communicating. It's just a way to cover your ass. If you try to choose your words carefully and explain the situation to your recipient, then you have to take some responsibility for their understanding. If you just copy them the 200 prior emails, you've "done your job." The responsibility to understand is now theirs.

This is a great strategy for protecting yourself in business, but it makes everything slower and more difficult for everyone else.

> This is a great strategy for protecting yourself in business

Yup. I believe you've reinforced my point.

>If you try to choose your words carefully and explain the situation to your recipient

Not always. Sometimes it's just easier to communicate the context by just copying them the thread. It might lead to shorter mails and less explaining.

if you do inline quoting, MS Outhouse web client thinks that everything after the beginning of the quotation is a copy of the previous message and folds the whole thing, meaning your recipients get back what looks like an empty message. Really.

Gah; that explains it. Occasionally I get a reply saying "you just sent me a blank email", while the text of my email is quoted right there in the email they've just sent me!

Using gnus, Outlook sees my quotes correctly. You can also "wash" messages from others so they look right.

The only correct response to that is, "No, I haven't. Please fix your email client, or learn how to use it properly."

That was my response 15 years ago. Unfortunately, I've lost that battle and moved on. There comes a point when trying to fight the common expectation leads to zero return.

(And yes, I miss the days where SMTP & NNTP servers would actually enforce the ratio of non-quoted lines vs. quotes lines, forcing users to trim the relevant parts of the message they are replying to.)

I used to try this. Imagine being the only person using some weird text based thing instead of just simply using "email" (ie. logging on to webmail). Remember there is a huge number of people who have not used anything but webmail (like gmail).

> With the exception of free software mailing lists, people simply do not know how to use email. Bottom quoting is the default. We can thank Microsoft for that one, I think. I can't understand why anyone thought it was a good idea to attach the previous message to the bottom. Most people just accept this as the way email is and never question how unbelievably stupid it is.

I think a lot of email clients expect that type of quoting/top-posting (conversation view for example). Another problem is that certain mobile email clients make it impossible to not bottom-quote. That is, they just present a composition window and don't give you the ability to position your text within the quoted email you're responding to.

Though I do find it interesting that people on Hacker news, Slashdot, and reddit will generally follow the convention of responding inline if they quote the parent post in their response. I don't recall anyone ever following the email "convention" of bottom-quoting.

Though HN doesn't make it easy to do inline quoting. I tried it just now, only to have my nicely formatted text block overflow due to the browser's text area idiosyncrasies.

Most people actually don't quote at all. It's just that the majority of mail clients out there, including the Web ones, quote the message being replied to and position the cursor above it, and no one takes the effort reformat it, or remove it.

Software needs to make it easy to choose portions of the message and automatically quote them in replies. Currently the usability of that aspect is broken. You have to cut and paste manually. A lot of messaging systems don't even add '>' marks.

> Though HN doesn't make it easy to do inline quoting. I tried it just now, only to have my nicely formatted text block overflow due to the browser's text area idiosyncrasies.

On HN, this is handled entirely by wetware - there's an unofficial convention. You quote the relevant part of a post by preceding it with '>' (but not turning it into a text area!). Many people (myself included) also italicize part after the '>' to make it more visually different from their response.

> Though I do find it interesting that people on Hacker news, Slashdot, and reddit will generally follow the convention of responding inline

Actually, they don't. Most posts don't quote their parent at all, it's a unitary response to the full parent post. Which is what bottom-quoting does - it doesn't actually quote the parent post, it leaves it in for reference (which makes sense because email clients, unlike HN, are pretty crap at keeping track of conversation threads).

Very few people communicate in the super-structured way that in-line quoting implies, that you go through an email sentence(/line/paragraph) by sentence(/..) and respond individually to them. It's super-arrogant, and thankfully getting very rare, to insist that your way, just because it was first, and then completely failed to catch on, is the one true way and people are "unbelievably stupid" to disagree with you.

>> Though I do find it interesting that people on Hacker news, Slashdot, and reddit will generally follow the convention of responding inline if they quote the parent post in their response.

> Actually, they don't. Most posts don't quote their parent at all

I never said that most people do. When you quoted my post in your response, you left off the clause where I said: "if they quote the parent post in their response".

> It's super-arrogant, and thankfully getting very rare, to insist that your way, just because it was first, and then completely failed to catch on, is the one true way and people are "unbelievably stupid" to disagree with you.

This aptly demonstrates that there value quoting the relevant parts of the post you're responding to. In this case, you're attributing statements that someone else made to me. If you want to argue against what you're quoting, then you should reply to the post that actually made those statements.

The beauty of inline quoting is that if you don't see a need to use it then you don't. It is in no way arrogant to suggest a method of replying which is unambiguous. Nobody is suggesting that it is used in places in which it is not necessary.

I hate to think of the hours wasted due to ambiguity in email replies. More often than not people end up using the telephone or meeting in person which wastes even more time rather than learning how to be clear. I don't understand why all effort to be clear and precise goes out of the window when dealing with email.

> which makes sense because email clients, unlike HN, are pretty crap at keeping track of conversation threads

Well, then, your email client is crap? E-Mail has all the headers you need, and mutt, for example, does it perfectly.

Bottom quoting means you read the answer before the question, breaking the logical flow of conversation. Not trimming means the messages have a vast amount of text to skip over each time.

MS Outhouse? Really? Are you a 13 year old boy in 2003? Your message shows that you've never used email in a corporate setting, where people cc other people (who will need copies of the previous correspondence) all the time, and people might take you more seriously if you leave out the Micro$oft 'jokes'.

I agree, it's a losing battle. Such a shame. I have one or two friends who quote inline, and I love getting emails from them. They look so clean and readable. But it's pointless trying to do it with most people because most people don't reply with inline quotes and just top post and it ends up as a godawful mess. So I barely even bother any more myself. I die a little every time.

These days, I just delete the entire block of text and post my response to thost types of emails :)

I switched to Outlook because I got too many "see my comments in orange below" :-(

> I used Dovecot to run an IMAP server locally which would get my mail when it could. This made it very quick in emacs because it wouldn't have to wait for any remote server.

I do a similar thing, but using mbsync to save into maildir. That way it's a simple cron job/systemd service to do the fetching, and Emacs/mutt/whatever can read the data without needing a server process to be running.

I used to use Gnus, but since it does everything in elisp it makes Emacs freeze :(

I now use mu4e, which uses an external command (mu) to query the maildir, so emacs remains responsive. My mail-fetching script also runs mu after mbsync's finished, to index any new messages.

> I can't understand why anyone thought it was a good idea to attach the previous message to the bottom. Most people just accept this as the way email is and never question how unbelievably stupid it is.

In addition to the obvious idiocy of sending someone a copy of what they just sent you ... I think it's funny to realize how this behaviour actually has quadratic space and bandwidth complexity:

If a thread is 10 message long, you have to store and transmit the data of 55 messages.

If a thread is 100 message long, you have to store and transmit the data of 5050 messages.

Or in general, if a thread is n message long, you have to store and transmit the data of n*(n+1)/2 messages.

And with Outlook, if you have a large TO or CC field that gets included at the top of the quoted message. Some dopes started reply-all chain at work a year or two back. After 3 or 4 messages it was a several MB message being sent to 1000 people.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned MH-E. I've used it continuously since the 80's. About 15 years ago it got multipart MIME support, which has improved every year. I can handle attachments like a boss. I even wrote a filtering system that sits on top of it (a replacement for the inc program that sorts into different inboxes).

> My message to you is right there in the same thread in my client. Don't send it back to me.

I do inline replies and all, but I still leave the quoted rest of the thread at the end of the message. If the recipient doesn't need it, they are free to ignore it. If the recipient needs it, then it's there. Many people don't use threaded email clients, or don't have access to the previous messages for whatever reason, and I don't want to second-guess how my recipient does things.

As long as it's clear where my reply ends and that there's nothing hidden at the end of the quoted previous messages, I really don't see the harm.

(About bandwidth or storage costs: they are negligible, and I do not think it is a good usage of time to worry about them.)

> I can't understand why anyone thought it was a good idea to attach the previous message to the bottom

Do you mean as opposed to putting the previous message on the top, or not including the previous message at all?

Long-time internet tradition has the replies going inline with the quoted message, with judicious trimming of irrelevant bits. It's frustrating that this has to be explained in the modern world. Smart young developers exist who have literally never seen a discussion that works that way.

For most messaging in larger organisations, having "paper trail"-style replies that you can forward to others has its advantages -- it better delimits in a single page who said what, and when.

If I know my conversation is intended to a small group I'll reply inline, but my default is quote-on-top.

Oh sure. The "mailing list" style presumes some archive exists where you can find the missing context. I'm not taking sides here (much), I'm just remarking how weird it is that kids today never even see the old style.

> For most messaging in larger organisations, having "paper trail"-style replies that you can forward to others has its advantages

That brings up another point about using email for group conversations. If organizations hosted their own NNTP servers and commonly installed email clients also supported communication via NNTP, then this wouldn't be a problem. All messages already posted to a group would be visible to anyone who joins it at a later time. That's not the case with an email discussion that gets Cc'd to someone at a later time (since they don't have any of the earlier messages in their mailbox).

Has any organization (Fortune 500-style company) ever, in the history of the world, hosted its own NNTP server and expected employees to use it for communication? My guess is absolutely not.

I suspect yes, because Lotus Notes was briefly very fashionable for corporate communication, and apparently supported NNTP, according to this article (PC Magazine, 24 Feb 1998):

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=C5-l28dcz50C&pg=PA186&lp...

(if the link doesn't work, search for NNTP Lotus Notes)

That's still a stupid reason.

There is a MIME type for emails, so you can attach emails to emails, retaining their identity as emails, so the receiving MUA can display the emails you receive as an attachment just like any other emails, including the user interface for replying to them, or whatever.

Also, there is threading information in email headers. So, it is actually trivial to just gather together all the emails belonging to a specific conversation and attaching them all to an email to a third party that needs the history.

Using this bottom full quote nonsense is about as sensible as attaching a screen shot of a word document or something.

While arguably it's Gmail's fault, there are email clients, such as Gmail, that do not behave well with, or perhaps support at all, emails as attachments. When emailing people who use Gmail (as personal email or as the host of their work email), sending emails as attachments just doesn't work well.

Well, yeah, sure, there is terrible software out there. But if you expect everyone you communicate with to live with terrible usability because you insist on using broken software, then you are just being an asshole. Email is an open, federated system, you can just switch to different client software.

There are many organizations that use Gmail to host their email but do not allow third party email clients (i.e., IMAP and POP are turned off).

And those organizations could change that, right?

FWIW, OpenBSD mailing lists still (mostly) follow this convention, for the curious "smart young developers."

> We can thank Microsoft for that one

And all the idiots who followed blindly.