Basically the title. For example, on things like Slack, WhatsApp, Teams and other IM services, you can edit messages after sending but with an email you can’t. I believe Microsoft Outlook has a feature that allows you to edit emails but afaik, it isn’t the same. What is the difference (technology wise) between the two that accounts for this difference?
Note: I know they are different systems. I’m asking what specific aspect of these applications makes emails difficult to edit, or would it (again, techwise) be easy to integrate this into an email system and for whatever reason, it hasn’t been done?
In: 4
IMs use a single app (typically) that is created by a single company that controls all of the sender’s client, the central server, and the recipient’s client. A message goes from A (sender) to B (server) to C (recipient), and is under the same company’s control the entire time. They can let you do whatever they want with it.
Email is not an app, it’s a protocol, and there is no single ’email company’ in control of it. A message might go from A to Q to R to N to B to F to C, all of which are owned by different companies/organizations. None of them control it, they merely know how to communicate with each other and pass a message along.
In theory, if they can pass along a message, they could also pass an “amend/replace this previous message” message along as well, and *if* the client understood it, that could work. But it was never designed in from the beginning and now there are countless systems and clients that wouldn’t understand it.
Also, people use email as a record or paper trail, and wouldn’t want it changing out from under them. You could theoretically design clients to keep a revision history and give a UI for that, but that just adds more complexity and again it would be different (or missing) for every system.
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