The three modern formats for email forwarded by people | Hacker News Reader

The three modern formats for email forwarded by people

utcc.utoronto.ca

69 pointszdw62 comments

Somehow not surprised to see that this links to a post by the same author shaking his fist at top-posting[1].

Is the topic still contested? In business email, top posting seems to have completely won. Are there any pre-eternal-September warriors still sticking Emily-Post-like to their 1992-era netiquette standards in the face of modernity?

[1] https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/TopPostingReal...

    On Tue, 10 Oct 2023 07:55 +1100 jameshart wrote:
    > Are there any pre-eternal-September warriors still sticking
    > Emily-Post-like to their 1992-era netiquette standards

    Yes.

    —- 
    inopinatus

On some IETF mailing lists (and similar communities, like LKML), bottom-posting and plain text messages are still the norm.

But, this requires more careful editing of the email (e.g. to trim irrelevant quoted text), in order to remain easy to read. So as a default for lazy^H^H^H^H^H people in a hurry, top-posting makes sense, IMO.

Why top posting vs just not having the redundant quoted content at all?

At least with mailing lists and Usenet they weren’t always redundant. Federation wasn’t perfect.

In a business context, you might CC a new person on an email, who wouldn't otherwise have all the context because it isn't on a mailing list, it's just a mail CCed to a bunch of people.

Inline and bottom posting is still very common on software dev mailing lists. It's just that those aren't quite as common themselves these days. :)

> Are there any pre-eternal-September warriors still sticking Emily-Post-like to their 1992-era netiquette standards in the face of modernity?

Have you ever heard of that site called HN?

HN shows the other message, so the standards have an entirely different foundation.

A decent mail client also shows the other message.

Unless you are suddenly added to the To: header of message 13 of a back and forth between people.

> Are there any pre-eternal-September warriors still sticking Emily-Post-like to their 1992-era netiquette standards in the face of modernity?

Plenty of people continue to comment inline. I wouldn't have quoted your comment except it's a humorous way to make this point :-)

It may be the kinds of people I hang out with, but I have observed:

1. Business people top post; they seem to want the top post reply to be short enough to read on the phone without scrolling and want the subject line to provide enough context so AFICT they never look the the quoted message.

2. Mailing lists I'm on have a mix of top post replies and inline replies; I've learned that the top-post responders can by and large be ignored.

3. People born after around 1998 tend not to reply to mail at all. I forced my born-in-98 kid to learn to write a good email (and boy was it a struggle) but when he was looking for a job he told me it was a superpower because the folks he was competing with couldn't/wouldn't do it.

> Business people top post

I started top posting and keeping the complete history because people were requesting it. They want to be able to quickly get the information at the top, but have the context below if they need it.

> People born after around 1998 tend not to reply to mail at all.

I've been running into this increasingly the past few years when conducting business. I don't understand how offices can function when lower-level people ignore a primary contact channel.

I top post because I hate the inconsistency of how message threads are handled. If someone can point me to a primer I’d greatly appreciate it. Outlook, Apple Mail, iOS all seem to handle it slightly differently.

Out of curiosity, could you clarify what you think is a good email? I feel like I have this skill but since I've never really been taught it, I don't really know.

As a sample, in my computer science department there is only myself and a single other academic that still fight the good fight. The rest seem to have never learned or given up as "modern" e-mail tools certainly favour top posting. I am known for taking stupid fights and being too stubborn for my own good, so I do not see myself caving in any time soon.

What I wish for is a script to "correct" the order of e-mails botched by top posters. Having that would save me some time whenever I feel the need to manually unwrap a conversation. But I have never managed to find one (lacking in web search skills?), so perhaps I should attempt to write one some day?

My personal rule, for what it's worth, is that if someone sends me a plain text message, my reply is inline, because I assume that anyone knowledgeable enough to shift the default from HTML-encoded to text is going to want that. For everyone else, I usually top-reply.

Of course, technology adjacent mailing lists are almost always text based, and I don't know of any where top posting is the norm, so I reply inline to mailing list posts as well.

Top-posting in reply to HTML emails and bottom-posting with trimming (or inline) to plain-text emails is indeed a pretty good heuristic for what the person you're replying to would most like.

Be aware that some e-mail clients automatically send plain text if no formatting is used.

But that's not what the post is saying? He's not shaking his fist at it, he's realizing that it's not as bad an idea as he'd thought: "top-posting is optimizing for the common case".

(And keep in mind that the post is from 2009. For comparison, I switched to top posting in my personal email in 2013 [1] at which point it was controversial [2])

[1] https://www.jefftk.com/p/abandoning-bottom-posting

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5233428

I take a middle ground and inject my message into the center of the chain.

I save everyone the trouble of guessing and just don't reply.

I prefer to reply-all with an ambiguous “Noted.”

Even better, just nuke the context and force readers to guess what you are responding to.

> Are there any pre-eternal-September warriors still sticking Emily-Post-like to their 1992-era netiquette standards in the face of modernity?

Yes, and one time it comes into play is when you're dealing with someone else who uses those conventions. IME, people still doing that are very sharp. And if they're doing it, you want to do it in kind, both because it can be more effective, and also to let them know you're clueful enough to know that style of email-fu.

But I also adapt to other people and organizations. For example, if some business person seems to keep the past history quoted, and also might be forwarding it within their bureaucracy to people who also expect that, then use that style. (And maybe also repair it to not drop history, such as when they respond to an old email, or they send two responses to the same people before anyone responds, or there's race conditions or oops/indifference when multiple people are responding. Not everyone has given any thought to how this works; they just start typing where their corporate-drone webmail or app left the cursor and quoted everything for them.)

When I have the luxury of setting an organization's conventions, I try to get people to capture all non-code institutional knowledge in a wiki and issue-tracker, and to not lean on ephemeral/silo'd email for the "history" of something, nor to create new silos in a dozen different SaaSes. (This also occasionally involves copy&paste of an email with important info into a wiki page, as the easiest way to leave some important info where whomever later needs it will see it.)

> Yes, and one time it comes into play is when you're dealing with someone else who uses those conventions. IME, people still doing that are very sharp. And if they're doing it, you want to do it in kind, both because it can be more effective, and also to let them know you're clueful enough to know that style of email-fu.

So it is a test to show if you are part of an ingroup or not. Just like any other etiquette... you know, you can tell the common folks from the upper crust by the way they use their fork! How you use your fork proved to be not a great predictor of sharpness in the end but it sure made life miserable for the upper crust. [1]

Frankly, from sharp people I expect to adapt to changing communication styles and utilize the one that facilitates communication the best. You seem to be doing that, so from my point of view you are sharper than those who insist on one way only.

[1] just because it is fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSj5stmFkQ0

I understand why it sounded like that, but I really don't think people do it intended as shibboleth, but because it is more effective.

I mentioned what sounds like potentially a shibboleth aspect reluctantly, with a sense that might be misleading. I should've characterized it better.

Maybe less like a shibboleth, and my thought was more like "We can have this higher-bandwidth communication, if I don't drop the ball" or "This is a person from my hometown or who shares my native language, and it would be stupid to use a different language, or not fallback to my hometown accent".

Top posting is so common that I often receive "you replied with an empty email" when I try to bottom post. I think some clients (maybe outlook?) will just automatically fold everything below a quote, resulting in my recipients not even notifying that there are replies below the quoted parts. I have given up.

I top-post and quote as required:

> something they said below

so that the context is still there inline, but anything irrelevant isn't, you still get the new message as the first thing (which frankly most clients seem to expect), just seems strictly better than bottom-posting and messing up the order & what's reply vs. replied-to to me.

Are there any pre-eternal-September warriors still sticking Emily-Post-like to their 1992-era netiquette standards in the face of modernity?

I don't really care if it's "netiquette" or not, but I nearly always want to reply to separate parts of an email with separate responses.. and writing inline replies is literally the only way to do that while being clear as to what you're replying to.

If it's a scrappy "yes" "no" type email then top posting is fine by me.

> The 'rendered text' and the whole message may be HTML, but I don't think very many mail clients will carefully construct a version that still has the images attached and so on [when forwarding it].

I'm surprised the author thinks this. I believe most popular email clients (Outlook, Thunderbird, and all web mail clients I know) do this, and it's what users expect when they forward an HTML email, I'd think.

Indeed. Fairly certain Mail.app does this as well, and is probably(?) the most popular mail client today. Author loses all credibility within the first 3 paragraphs imo.

Mail.app the most popular client, are you kidding?

I don't think I even know a Mac user who uses it, and I'd remind you that you've already limited to Mac users.

Surely the most popular client is Gmail web? But Outlook, and iOS default even, presumably beat Mail.app by far too.

iOS default is Mail.app also.

Yeah, I don’t think I’ve ever used a client that doesn’t include attachments (at least by default) and handle all cid: hrefs in any HTML.

Outlook sometimes likes to swallow normal attachments when forwarding/replying or some combination. I've never experienced issues with inline images though.

Honestly, don't bother, because we all know how this works in practice:

There is a button in my mail client that says "forward". If I want to forward a mail, I click that, put in address(es) and click "Send". If I'm feeling especially generous, I am gonna type a quick "FYI" ontop of the message field. Usually I don't, and trust that the recipient(s) will draw the correct conclusion from the "Fwd:" that is prefixed to the subject.

Whatever format is used, idc. that's up to my mail client. I am not gonna, and I don't want to, worry about this detail. That's why I outsource this to a program.

Even if I worried about it, it would be completely moot. I get emails from at least 3 dozen people every day. Many of those are forwarded. These people use at least half a dozen different mail clients, and most act exactly as described above. It is completely impossible for me to somehow enforce a standard, so I stopped worrying about it.

I try to be polite, in a work context at least.

I preface the email with "2 minute read; 3 questions to answer" or some such.

I don't write many emails these days though.

That seems like a really nice way to preface something that's otherwise self explanatory.

It helps people who are thinking, "I have two minutes, can I deal with this now?"

In the example the answer would be no, because I'm expecting a response, and just reading my email would take all that, so there is no time to write a response.

But I'm not thinking that.

I am thinking: "This block of text looks like it will take me 4 minutes. Do I have 4 minutes"?

The estimate of someone else about how long something will take me to digest and work through may be completely irrelevan to me.

Things someone with a finance rather than technical background thinks will take 10 minutes, I may be able to quickscan and reply to within less than a minute. On the other hand, I have had questions to POs about mails regarding business minutia that took time for me to roughly grasp, and they replied within a few minutes, because that's their area of expertise.

Yea but how does this help? I can gauge very easily if the mount of text I received takes 2 mins or 20 mins to read by just looking at the length of it.

That's not the problem at all.

But "3 questions to answer" could take anything from 30 seconds to 30 hours, depending on the complexity, severity and dependence on others of said answers.

If you use "Getting Things Done"-like triage, you know that it goes into the pile of things that you deal with when you have a solid block of time. Not just a spare couple of minutes.

Edit: when you do get to it you can then make further time allocations.

Not sure what the issue is; I have had several people thank me for doing this.

Yeah, something like a "fyi" or "fya" or "ans them pls, me in cc" or "send ans 2 me 1st" is already better than a blank forward.

If I see an email, I can get a rough estimate on how long it will take me to read just from the visual amount of text blocks on my screen. The same goes for questions: I see them in the text, the additional information at the top doesn't add value for me as the reader.

If I want a specific question answered, I will ask that in the pretext to the forwarded mail. If I want to draw the attention of the reader to a specific part of the mail, I don't forward, I just quote that part.

Forwarding is a way for me to either say: "Hey, I think you should be aware of this" or "I think this concerns you more than it does me", or "I think this is for you". What the recipient of the forward then makes of that, is his business, not mine.

How do you open a .eml file? I downloaded a bunch of emails as . eml files recently when I was organizing my expenses, and couldn't find a good way to open them on my computer to look at them.

Outlook would probably be my first guess, but I also don't see many folks having the full Outlook client these days unless it's a work computer and your company uses Microsoft.

For the businesspeople in my office, the answer is to just leave them in your mailbox until the retention policy gets them, or print them to PDF. I don't think anyone works with .eml directly.

In the early days of my IT career I had an executive who had his secretary print all of his emails on paper and put them in an IN box on his desk... Never had an IT complaint from him either. FYI, this was in the mid 2000s, how the meteor missed him, I have no idea.

for a brief period I had to correspond with a lawyer whose mail program generated them; I discovered that you could simply double click them in Apple Mail and they would open.

Given that APple preferes to rewrite rather than bug-fix/upgrade I have no idea if that's still true; haven't seen one in many years.

If you drag a message out from Apple Mail, say to the desktop, it will save that message as a .eml file. And if you inspect it, it's simply the raw message itself — as it would be in, say, a Maildir folder. You can literally 'cat' the file. Unless there are multiple versions of '.eml' that have different formats...

I'd give ytnef and libpst a try. They both come with a command line tool suite for working with Outlook files.

https://github.com/Yeraze/ytnef

https://www.five-ten-sg.com/libpst/

Use the ImportExportTools extension in Thunderbird: https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/impor...

… if you have Thunderbird installed, and emails (.eml files) are associated with it, all you have to do is open the file. (E.g., … double click the .eml file.)

Opening in Gmail is the easiest for me, as I don't have desktop email clients configured.

Just send the .eml files as attachments to yourself in a gmail or gapps account. When you click the attachment preview on the received message, it pops out a window displaying the email rendered as if it was sent/received in gmail. Includes inline MIME images too. You can print rendered pages from there.

I found this feature pretty neat! And a bit unexpected.

You know what, I think I actually did that. I remember now, it worked for some emails, but some of them it said were malformed and it couldn't open them (even though I use gmail to generate them in the first place).

I started the 'eml-client' in github.com/OJFord/amail as a way of viewing them rendered (they are plaintext files, so one answer is you can just read in less or whatever, depending what you need to see).

However fairly early on I discovered notmuch, so then switched it from being a viewer for just a bunch of eml on disk to a GUI notmuch client. So if you want to use a recent version of it you'd need also to install notmuch (it's very lightweight) and create its index pointing to your eml directory.

It's very much a slow WIP, afaik I'm its only user, no releases you'd have to build from source, etc. - but happy to help if you're interested.

I wanted to use .eml files for local development: instead of sending real emails to make sure the content is formatted properly, why not just save a file somewhere and open it with a viewer.

However I couldn't find an application for just viewing emails.

> I don't know if it's very common for mail clients to offer an easy way to do the third.

Mac OSX:

2) find mail message you want to forward, in a separate view pane, can be single message or a thread or a message from a thread

3) drag-and-drop it into the reply you are composing

4) voila: a .eml attachment is made.

1) don't even think about looking for the right way to do this, because you're lazy (me that is: I really would have preferred NOT to make a .eml but it happened)

That's the author's second format (MIME), not third (plaintext).

More fool me for a mis-construe of the text. I thought he complained .EML were not easy to attach. Obviously his beef is that plaintext is the hard one.

(I am also an NMH user since the old MH days. Just a very simplistic one. The wonderful email-auth-proxy author has made it tenable to use NMH in a world of Oauth)

When forced to use gmail (and I expect most webmail systems) I miss 'bounce' which I have used forever in elm and now mutt.

'bounce' sends the message exactly as received, only changing the destination address, as if the new recipient was BCC'd.

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