When you reply to an email, it will include the entire previous email thread in your reply to that email.
Why does this happen when most email clients are able to show email threads, making this seem kind of redundant.
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It is so that a user can see what was or is being talked about. This is in many email apps because not all afford threading. Also,f for people who get many emails, it presents the context of the message.
This feature is a throwback to the data when papers were shuffled around. A copy of the original note would be attached to the reply, or, a new note was stapled with
The other notes in a file folder.
You can disable this feature in many email applications.
For business, this is a great way to keep track of the entire conversation. Some people may be added later and to allow them to see the entire thread allows for transparency without having to catch someone up. It’s always best practice to get everything confirmed in writing, this included email. Keeping it all in the same spot prevent people from having to track down other parts of the discussion.
The feature of email clients like Outlook to show threads is quite cumbersome to use. In my job, I get about 20-50 emails a day, some of which require immediate attention. So the standard view is “latest first”. If I want to see the thread of an email, I have to right-click it and select “show all in this conversation”, which hides all other emails and only shows those belonging to this “thread”. And even then I have to open each individual email in the chain to view its contents.
I used that feature maybe thrice in 15 years of work. I scroll down in newly arrived emails to see what was previously written about ten times a day, each day. That’s why it’s included by default.
Also, please don’t assume that just because you understand how a feature works, others will as well. As recently as 5 years ago, I saw two middle-aged women working in an engineering department printing out emails, so that they could have them in front of them to re-type their contents by hand into a web form, because both women had never heard about “copy paste”. When our intern showed them, their minds exploded.
Historically, there has pretty much always been a convention of quoting at least part of the previous reply. In earlier internet days, you didn’t have a lot of email storage space–I think I started with something like 1 meg of mailbox space on my university VAX system, and with no Reddit or forums, I was on a couple of email discussion lists that sometimes generated 100 emails a day–so I’m deleting things just about as fast as I’m reading them. Which means I need context in your reply.
So this resulted in what now tends to be referred as “inline” replies, where you quote what you need for context and reply below that.
But then AOL and Microsoft released email clients that put the cursor of the reply at the top of a fully quoted email, and that’s what new people started doing. Why did they do this? I don’t have a definitive answer–it may be just a matter of not being able to reliably teach the flood of new people (“eternal September”) current process, and it was seen to be better to have the new stuff on top rather than quote the whole thing and add the new stuff at the bottom.
There were many “netiquette” flamewars between the two different styles for a bit, but the top-posting style won, and increases in storage ability made storage issues largely irrelevant.
‘Let’s bring Jim in on this’
Do you wanna CC Jim to catch him up on the whole thread?
Or do you wanna write an email describing everything everyone else said before you decided to include Jim?
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