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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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.
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