Reply by email and inline replies

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Recently, someone replied to one of my posts on our site, simply saying:

Thanks, Dave. My comments are inline

But that was it. On closer inspection, I noticed that the post was a reply by email. I clicked on the little email icon and saw the rest of what they had said, sprinkled in like:

Thanks, Dave. My comments are inline

On Thu, Jun 21, 2018 at 2:45 PM David McClure <ourforum@discoursemail.com>
wrote:

> dmcclure <https://www.ourforum.com/u/dmcclure> David McClure
> <https://www.ourforum.com/u/dmcclure> Some Title
> June 21
>
> I’m really happy to see how things have started to come together

Some stuff they said that didn't show up in their post

> Some more stuff I had said in my earlier post

Some more stuff they said that didn't show up in their post...

There was an older topic discussing some of this, but I flagged it because it was unclear from reading it was was expected in this situation from reading it (and so it’s since been deleted).

But I’m still unclear about whether this is expected behavior at this point or whether “it depends” on some site settings or the email client, or something else.

Or should we be telling users just not to do that? (If so, perhaps there should be some line in the outgoing email to say so?)

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It generally works but it depends on the email client and how it formats the email body as I recall. It’s safer to reply at the top, yes.

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On <date> <name> <email> wrote:

> some quoted text
> foo bar

Is a very good indicator that what’s coming after isn’t very useful.

Unfortunately, as most of the “rules” applied to emails, it’s not working 100% of the times…

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Replying inline is a feature pretty heavily used on mailing lists (at least within Mozilla). We haven’t seen many people trying to do it on Discourse (or, they have been, and haven’t known when it has gone wrong), but as people gradually make the transition from mailing lists to Discourse I expect to see more people trying to do it.

Could having a site-wide preference which attempts to process inline replies at the risk of sometimes posting unnecessary email content be a solution here? We’d be happy to have inline replies consistently working if it meant the occasional fully quoted replied to email.

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From my experience, it wouldn’t be occasional. It would be pretty much every email replies.

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