Today, in regular email conversation (on several unrelated topics), a very good friend (left anonymous unless they ask differently, but I can’t imagine why they’d care, as they’ve several blogs that are better-read than mine) expressed frustration with their webmail provider (which I’ll just leave nameless here, less because of privacy or respect than because ALL ARE GUILTY). This frustration triggered a knee-jerk response for me about the ways in which computer software sucks… definitely a top-five knee-jerk response on that topic, although I’ve never enumerated that list, even for myself. There may be another post in that.
Anyhow, a portion of my response to them, edited only mildly (mostly to fill in a detail here or there that anyone who knows me in person, such as the recipient, already knows; also to make efficient use of HTTP for footnotes, because I don’t strictly hate the format, just its misuse, the deeper humor of which you may appreciate shortly) follows.
At 2011-08-20 14:19 -0700, [REDACTED] wrote:
> You know, my Email doesn’t do that
> >
> >
> >
> thing anymore, which is inconvenient, because I do like to respond to Emails in chunks.
OH BOY have you touched a nerve with me there. None of the following is directed at you, so you can skip it entirely, but if you’re curious…
Once upon an apparently more gentle and simple time on the Internet, before, if you can believe this, the hyper-text transfer protocol (HTTP) and, thus, the world-wide web, we all just sent email as plain, goddamn text[1]. In order to reference material that someone else had sent, there was a de-facto standard of progressive indentation with a single character (and, for readability, a space), and a single quote line (often repeated on later quotation for simplicity) so that the conversation read like a mother-fucking conversation, should it be referred to later or any third party brought into the conversation. And the world was Good.
Then, along came the web, graphics, HTML email and, especially, Microsoft Outlook[2]. For reasons I’ll never, ever understand (it was simpler to code it that way? Maybe? But even that doesn’t make sense) the default behavior in Outlook (and, in fairness, Lotus Notes, which is a really great application environment with a really terrible mail reader UI) was to quote the entire previous email thread, including all kinds of crap that was no longer relevant, and put the user’s insertion cursor, upon reply, at the very *top*.
That simple decision had two major, I have to believe, unforseen implications, both of which I find to be undesirable. You see, people in a hurry just replied where the cursor landed. While that’s an understandable impulse (and even one that makes sense: quick messages should just be quick messages, skip the editing), there are two significant side effects.
First, in order to review the full conversation in context, the *reader* must scroll all the way to the bottom and then read not precisely upwards but down, then up, then down in spurts which are a stupid waste of time.
Second, *all* of the messaging history is retained, not just the parts that remain relevant to the continuing conversation, which is just a waste of message transfer resources (in the modern day, this is statistically irrelevant as compared with unsolicited commercial email, but the fact that your neighbors throw all of their refuse out the window onto the street is not a justification for you to litter).
Part of the reason that this *really* chaps my hide is that back at my first job out of college, back when I actually thought it was worth my while to swim upstream against the significant torrent and install an operating system other than Windows on the computer I used day-to-day for work on the basis that it’d make me slightly more efficient at my job, I was happily emailing away when my boss’s boss, the CTO, upbraided me (for bonus points, through a co-worker, my peer) for not adhering to the “quote fucking everything” format. His basis for this was that he, an adult male working in the IT industry at least since 1990, had grown used to the ass-backwards way Microsoft thought he should read email, and trying to read my emails (in which I quoted ONLY the relevant portions of emails, in an effort to *save* the reader time) irritated him. There were a lot of reasons I got fired from that job, but that’s definitely one of them. (In the end, my solution was to quote everything attached to the end of my edited-for-reading email, and I never heard anything more about it, but I’m pretty sure he caught my implied bird as flown.)
Now (as in “these days”, not just a convenient linguistic interjection), not only does Outlook work this way: Apple’s Mail.app works this way; Lotus Notes (for the forlorn few who still maintain it) works this way; Yahoo mail works this way; the insanely-popular-in-German-speaking-nations GMX.net works this way; inumerable web-based mail readers work this way; G-fucking-Mail works this way.
I’ve lost this fight, and I know it, but there are certain offenses up with which I will not put.
How is my mail reader different? My mail reader is Mutt. It is entirely text-based, and it runs only in a text-based interface (I believe that there’s a version that runs under Windows in the command terminal, but I wouldn’t know, since I no longer swim against that particular stream, so I just use Outlook for work, although I do use Mutt, through a screen(1)-maintained SSH session, in Terminal.app, on my home computer; you know, rather than using Mail.app). The interface to move through messages is obtuse if you’re used to pointy-clicking everything (although, if you enable keyboard shortcuts, gmail actually uses the same ones that Mutt does), but it’s familiar and efficient to me (you may recall, if you know me, that I generally advise people to keep using whatever computer interface they’re used to using), and you, my reader, don’t have to give a shit about that… because the messages that it produces are FUCKING LEGIBLE. Should I like to read email from an outside mail provider (rather than the mail server I take care of myself), I can do that, because I can use extablished protocols (IMAP and POP) to retrieve those messages and another (SMTP) to send messages back to it.
More relevantly, Mutt quotes the entirety of the message to which I’m responding, noting from whom it’s quoting that message in a single line at the top, indenting the quoted material with “> ” on each line. It puts my editing cursor at the top of that file to add my response… which line begins, “At 20…”. And then I insert my responses, in context, as appropriate, and elide the portions of the message to which I’m responding that are no longer relevant. Except for that one ex-boss, I haven’t had any complaints.
So… if your mail reader is not working for you, perhaps it’s time to consider a change? I’m not suggesting you install Linux on that Windows laptop, not even that you buy a Mac, but you really aren’t locked into what they think is a good idea. Given that they’re giving you the service for free, you probably can’t force them to change back as a customer, but you maybe don’t even have to change email addresses to do it. Just a thought.
[1] We also posted to a shared-resource “news” protocol, called Usenet using the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), using whatever software we chose to use, rather than posting to isolated and radically different web forums and blogs using whatever crackpot webform whoever owns the server where it’s running decided was a good idea. But that’s a whole separate rant.
[2] Actually, not Microsoft, but NeXT, the short-lived computer company Steve Jobs left Apple in a huff to found in the early 1980s, was the first primary offender here, but NeXT users were also Unix people, and they generally eschewed the crappy email format, so MS is really to blame for forcing this crap on the world. Also, NeXT failed, and NeXTStep, the OS they built, became Mac OS X, after Apple bought the scraps, after Steve went back. NeXTMail is, thankfully, totally dead, not that Apple’s Mail.app mail reader is all that great, really. But, again, that’s a separate rant.
