[Nottingham] Farewell (email and posting)

[Martin]

On 04/06/10 11:42, Joshua Lock wrote:
> On 4 June 2010 11:23, Martin <martin at ml1.co.uk> wrote:
>> On 04/06/10 10:51, Graeme Fowler wrote:
>>> A once useful list, descended into the depths of hair splitting. Shame,
>>> really.
[---]
>>
>> That means that a thread grows *exponentially* in storage!

Which can only work if the mail stays on some mega server and the
clients only then display only the parts that are actually read by a
human...


>> And is that what people actually want? Or is it a default because noone
>> cares?
> 
> They are "imposing" this not to follow business practice, but to make
> it easier to reply to emails with your dinky keyboard, which is even
> more painful if it's on-screen.
> 
> I believe this is the right design decision too! And I'm a fastidious
> in-line commenter and mail trimmer when I'm using a full email UI.

I still think that a neater way would be to append all new text onto the
/end/ of an existing email thread so that the whole thread can be read
like a story.

That also then avoids older parts of the thread getting quoted off to
fall off the right of the screen into oblivion.


> Get a better mail client, one that can collapse quotes. Do any desktop
> clients do this? That would be awesome!
> /me goes to file a bug report...

Good idea! Now I rather liked the code/paragraph collapsing idea of the
Occam editor of very old.


Another idea that I rather like is shown on a forum posting system
whereby you can select to have all the posts in forward or reverse
chronological order. Your browser is automatically positioned at the
start of the latest unread post. You then scroll up or down as you prefer.


One thought though is:

Do we want to be trapped to /only/ using web browsers to view everything
on webmail?


Cheers,
Martin

-- 
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Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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