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0 pointsgknoy1y ago0 comments

You jest, but I've noticed that the conventions of "newest on top" vs "newest on bottom" is _seriously confusing_ for some people that I help navigate tech stuff. I don't know how to describe the heuristic for:

- New text conversations show at the _top_ of the list of conversations - New messages are at the _bottome_ of a conversation - New emails are at the _top_ of your email client (?) - and now you remind me that email replies can be both at top and bottom (:

It feels arbitrary, but I suspect this is due to the heritage of paper, where newer things are on top of the pile, but in a given document, newer text tends to be added at the bottom/end. (it's a stretch :))

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GJim1y ago

No.

Bottom posting replies was the default in all early email and USENET clients.....

Then MS Outlook came along, which was the first email client to break convention and default to top posting (i.e. putting the cursor at the top when replying to a message). Thence forth, "office" users began top posting, and the confusion began.

To this day, the old guard (like me) bottom posts and always trims the above quoted text of irrelevant details (!). Anything else was considered not only lazy and sloppy, but the mark of a noob with bad netiquette.

p_l1y ago

A significant part of weirdness involving outlook/exchange is that it is not an SMTP-based email client

Even though X.400 is no longer officially feature of Exchange, the entire data model of MAPI is based on it, shared between Outlook and Exchange, with somewhat lossy translation when it has to go outside of X.400-over-RPC that MAPI provides.

Sometimes you can get burned by vestigial parts of the model, like how MS MAPI implementation as provided by Outlook/Exchange (there used to be others!) does not actually support HTML email, and crashes with corrupted message errors if given an email object containing a HTML body.

Now I can hear you going "but Outlook does HTML email!".

Outlook converts HTML email body part into RTF-wrapped HTML and stores the resulting message in RTF body field of message object. In fact, before Outlook got changed to convert RTF to HTML, Outlook users were infamous for sending RTF formatted emails (at least RTF was always documented, as it was supposed to be interchange format).

But MAPI messages do also contain a HTML message body field... But if you put HTML there, MAPI.DLL explodes - or at least did every time I did it.

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