[speerer]

I don't understand why this isn't configurable. Why can't the basic data structures (of one email after another in serial) be displayed in either order depending on mail client settings?

Admittedly I haven't looked into it because I'm perfectly fine with top posted emails. But I routinely sort files in my directory. Why not emails in a displayed thread?

[bregma]

It's people quoting text, not threads of messages.

The ability to semantically parse text to determine what order paragraphs should be displayed in to suit the tastes of the individual reader is a very recent development. Or, rather, will be soon. Maybe not very soon.

[SoftTalker]

Quoting the prior message(s) should be off by default. When paper letters were still written, did you enclose a copy of the original letter when you answered it? No. And nobody looks at the growing trail of the entire message thread that's copied below your reply. Just leave the subject line intact and anyone that doesn't have a brain-dead email client will see the messages threaded properly.

If you need to address a specific point in a message you're replying to, quote just that bit.

We are emailing TBs of data around daily that provides no value to anyone.

[GJim]

> When paper letters were still written, did you enclose a copy of the original letter when you answered it?

The point of bottom posting was you never left the original text intact, but trimmed it to show the relevant details you are replying to and so enhance readability. Exactly as I am doing now in this reply.

> If you need to address a specific point in a message you're replying to, quote just that bit.

Precisely. Just like this. We are on the same page!

[thworp]

As the other comment mentioned, the email body contains the entire quote chain. The way clients accomplish threaded display is a combination of:

- parsing the unstructured email body and looking for quote levels, html formatting and printed email heads

- parsing certain headers like message-id, in-reply-to, dkim sig

- looking for sections of the message body in the inbox

This is done because there is nothing in the protocol to cleanly accomplish what you want. Even if there was, you could not rely on it at all. Doing anything with email is a gigantic PITA, you sometimes get emails where the msg-encoding header doesnt match the body's encoding, html in the plaintext section and other fun things.

Since nobody really cares about the RFC and just does their own thing, there is no chance at improvement.

[lproven]

This is true. OTOH, I do think the problem is solvable.

I came up with a routine to parse and translate about 2-3GB of saved emails into MBox format once.

The official delimiter is unbelievable, IMHO.

« the exact character sequence of "From", followed by a single Space character (0x20), an email address of some kind, another Space character, a timestamp sequence of some kind, and an end-of-line marker. »

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4155

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox

That's it. An email is a section of text beginning with

From $something

That's the spec.

[immibis]

Certain software used to add a > before any line starting with From in an email body because of this.