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Comment by aembleton | Hacker News Reader

> I can assure you that random guy next desk will not care about your "this is a top-posting-thread" header and bottom post there.

We should move away from having a single mutable body for email. It should be a series of immutable messages that reference the message that it is replying to. Each message can contain a hash signed by the private key for the domain that wrote it. Then when you write your message it just gets appended to this chain.

How it is shown is up to the email client so that it can be done in the best way for the user.

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What you’re describing is already possible with email as it is, using the In-Reply-To header or whatever its name was. No need for cryptographic signatures. The only issue is that common mail clients still automatically quote the whole message being replied to for no good reason. It should work like it used to on phpbb forums: no quote by default, quote selected part if text is selected.

> The only issue is that common mail clients still automatically quote the whole message being replied to for no good reason.

Here is a good reason: In-Reply-To is a reference, not content. The recipient(s) of your message might not have that email.

Also including the quote is a default. The sender can edit it, splice responses into it and remove irrelevant parts of it. Admittedly quoting norms are in shambles though for various reasons.

> Each message can contain a hash signed by the private key for the domain that wrote it.

Me being able to prove that I wrote something is good. Other people being able to prove that I wrote something… it's good under many circumstances, but not in general.

What about responding inline to parts of a message?

We do it like Hacker News. It's just another message, with > indicators. Globally, inline replies are A. Rare and B. Often used with prank intent (i.e. you can make it look like you're replying to something they didn't say).

Not sure about globally, but on most mailing lists I read they are used quite often.

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