Email and posting style

What kind of data is moving around in modern software? That question has been on my mind lately, because I suspected it would be a whole lot of noise. A bunch of noise that is the result of the modern software that is often proprietory and lacks the care or need to be streamlined and thoughtful.

If you think I am exaggerating, I invite you to the following exercise. Open up a random email you received from a company, and look for the “show source” option in your email program. Chances are that you are presented with a large wall of HTML with probably a lot of noise that is not text content of the email. But okay, you say that is needed to make it look professional and pleasant to read, so far all reasonable.

What is not reasonable is the total size typically sent emails take up. And to understand that better, take a look at the structure of an email that is a reply. You know, with the title typically starting with “Re: …”. Under the hood that email has a “In-Reply-To” header. So if you have the previous message, your email program can piece them together and visually show the chain of messages as a thread.

If you look closer to the raw text of such a reply email, you see something different. Instead of just linking to the reply, the reply is typically also quoted in full. Modern email clients like Microsoft Outlook do this when you press “reply” and have influenced what is considered “normal” via these provided defaults.

That means that the size of the email grows steadily, as each reply copies all previous conversation history again and again. Totally unneeded if you are replying to the same person, which should already have that message history. It should not be surprising that this allows selling more storage space to organisations.

Does this go by unnoticed? Because what about the size of the emails you receive? Anything under a megabyte does not sound like much to most people. Most work environments encourage email footers, typically with a company logo. And that logo is also typically not linked, but copied in full as an attachment.

People talk a lot about “consider before you print this email”, but what about the footprint of the email itself on datacenters? This behavior is not the fault of its users, it is a symptom of the software making it. The discovery of this information for me started with using a different email client. And with curiosity of how email functions and the discussions people had in the past about email.

Recently I was pleasantly surprised and educated by the format I received an email reply in. It was neatly in text form, with interleaved replies and no further noise. That lead me to revisiting this topic and eventually also to writing this article.

Read more about posting style here