Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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?

> 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)

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com