On 2021-01-16 14:01:44 -0700, Rob Sargent wrote:
> Mail has always been well threaded, retaining which message lead to which
> replies. How did we get away from relying on that (naked posting)?
Has that ever been a thing? Quoting (and trimming) the message you are
replying to has been normal since at least the late 1980's (when I
started to use E-Mail). Unix-based mailers (at least since elm, not sure
about mailx) automatically quoted the previous mail with the ">" prefix.
Eudora (on Windows) did that also, if I remember correctly. Few people
deleted everything. Probably because most MUAs displayed only one
message at a time. The first MUA I've seen that displayed an entire
thread at once was Gmail.
hp
--
_ | Peter J. Holzer | Story must make more sense than reality.
|_|_) | |
| | | hjp@hjp.at | -- Charles Stross, "Creative writing
__/ | http://www.hjp.at/ | challenge!"