Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (4348 mails)

[Graham Murray <graham@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Kevin McLauchlan <kevinmcl@xxxxxxxx> writes:

> This arrangement got duplicated when office 
> e-mail came along.  Sometimes, people respond 
> to a multi-point e-mail by "My comments are 
> embedded, below". Otherwise, they add their 
> two-cents worth at the top, so that busy executives 
> and managers can see the latest at a glance.
>
> Therefore, MS Outlook and other Windows mail 
> readers tend to default to that model of message 
> trail handling.

NO they did not! What they did is analogous to exchanging letters by
post and each correspondent photocopying the previous correspondence,
adding their new material and sending it all in the envelope. Passing
correspondence files around is fine within an office or even an
organisation, but when sending letters it is more normal to put a
reference to previous correspondence at the top of the letter. (In
business) Both the sender and recipient maintain they own files
containing the correspondence.

The traditional email paradigm follows this system. It contains
"In-Reply-To:" and/or "References" headers which are analogous to the
both the references at the top of (paper) mail and the index in the
correspondence file. As both sender and recipient have (local) copies
replies should only quote sufficient to give context rather than
repeating the whole "bundle". "High Quality" mail readers maintain
the thread "tree" and allow the reader to easily refer back to
previous correspondence.