[HN Gopher] The three modern formats for email forwarded by people
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       The three modern formats for email forwarded by people
        
       Author : zdw
       Score  : 24 points
       Date   : 2023-10-08 17:04 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (utcc.utoronto.ca)
 (TXT) w3m dump (utcc.utoronto.ca)
        
       | jameshart wrote:
       | 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...
        
         | inopinatus wrote:
         | 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
        
         | twiss wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | singpolyma3 wrote:
           | Why top posting vs just not having the redundant quoted
           | content at all?
        
             | TylerE wrote:
             | At least with mailing lists and Usenet they weren't always
             | redundant. Federation wasn't perfect.
        
         | ninjin wrote:
         | 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?
        
         | ryukafalz wrote:
         | 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. :)
        
         | TacticalCoder wrote:
         | > 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?
        
           | Dylan16807 wrote:
           | HN shows the other message, so the standards have an entirely
           | different foundation.
        
         | gumby wrote:
         | > 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.
        
       | twiss wrote:
       | > 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.
        
         | ghostly_s wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | subarctic wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | soupfordummies wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | jabroni_salad wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | mgiampapa wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | tuukkah wrote:
         | Use the ImportExportTools extension in Thunderbird:
         | https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/impor...
        
         | gumby wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | jslabovitz wrote:
           | 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...
        
         | Karellen wrote:
         | 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/
        
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       (page generated 2023-10-09 23:01 UTC)