I started reading mail in the 90's with a program called "pine" in the command line of a BSD machine... I find that mail easier to understand than outlook. :)

Just a matter of getting used to, I guess.

They are very comfortable to read with email software like Mutt, when you’re actually on the mailing list (and are auto-sorting the list mails into a dedicated folder). There are keyboard shortcuts to jump to the next message in a thread, or to the next unread message, to collapse/expand (sub)threads, and you get a nice tree view of the threaded messages, displaying the subject line only on messages where the subject changes; the pager can be set to automatically jump to the first unquoted part of a message, and so on. On par with Usenet TUI clients, it’s the most efficient discussion medium I known of.

Mailing list emails end up full of markup, but the people who send them tend to be very consistent—always quoting previous messages, always posting new text at the bottom (instead of the top, which is default email client behavior these days). Email apps can apply some formatting to make them easier to read, too, for this same reason.

So while they often get overly-full of markup like these ones, the markup follows a pattern that's rarely broken, and it becomes very easy to follow after you've gotten through a few threads.

I find Twitter equally as hard to read as emails like this, or any group conversation in email really.

For both, it seems like I read messages in random order and then have to guess at the general gist. There's seems like no easy way to get an accurate timeline of things.

I think the problem is made worse when people forward (or retweet) as part of a conversation. There's often forwards of other email chains included as a reply with or without unique new messages being added.

Sometimes people are left off part of the CC chain for some messages, so there are gaps in the flow.

The problem is compounded when there are multiple email threads about the same thing, often because someone replied to an old version that turned into a new conversation. Or they read just the first sentence in the original email and replied about that in the newest follow-up in a 100 email chain.

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As an off topic side note, text chat programs are the ultimate form of communication. It has the fewest flaws of all mediums. It's linear in a single timeline that everybody has (and has the history to). It's pretty hard to mess up the history of what happened or who said what.

I enjoy it when people get frustrated about text chat. It's almost always because they can't dominate the conversation by talking over people or "win by talking loudest" which makes them frustrated and uncomfortable.

You're looking at one message with quoted messages so the oldest messages are those with the highest level of '>' so usually start there for some context to where things started and work out.

How do you mean? There are links to the full thread at the bottom of the page.

If you're talking about the quoting, the ">" marks denote one level of quoting, so the more ">" marks in a line, the older the message. As long no unwashed heathen has top-posted their reply, then you can just read the message top to bottom in chronological order.

> How does one read this classic style email chain?

From top to bottom, like we did for centuries.

Replies at the top are the devil’s work. Or maybe Microsoft.

Scroll down and you'll see the thread - navigate the tree as you wish.