[pm215]

My solution to the "find all the comments made on one patch" is variously (a) look at that email subthread only or (b) use a webinterface like patchwork (eg https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/938069/) or patchew (eg http://patchew.org/QEMU/20180629162122.19376-1-peter.maydell...). patches (https://github.com/stefanha/patches) can handle the tedious bit of collecting up all the Reviewed-by: tags people sent for you.

The key thing about any tool that's trying to improve an email-based workflow is that it has to interoperate with people still using the traditional "just an email client" tools. Better web UIs for people who want to use web UIs are something I'd love to see, but a big-bang switchover to a completely different format won't work for large projects, where mandating changes of tooling is a really hard sell. All the three tools I list above take the "interoperate with the existing patches-in-email transport" approach.

[cryptonector]

Yes, the difficulty lies in having to deal with just-whatever-the-users-and-their-MUAs-do. It's a bit of a mess. But a bit of convention can be taught to users -- think of Markdown, which has been quite a success because it's just a bit of convention that users were often accidentally using anyways. A bit of convention can go a long way.

The real challenge is that the GUI MUAs often make it hard for users to use even a bit of convention in plain text... I'm thinking of Outlook in particular, but it's not the only one. Even with an MUA that does angle-bracket quoting the right way and encourages users to trim quotes and bottom-post, the fact is that editing plain text is difficult and boring for most non-vim/emacs users out there, and that is most users. This problem can't be solved by the author of TFA, but if the author of TFA solves the problems that are in their bailiwick, then that could add pressure on MUA developers.