> > Btw, if I were on my phone, the manipulation necessary to drop the reply > block would have taken substantially longer than > typing the message itself. >
> As Luca > pointed out, it's not just Google: most of the popular email clients > behave the same way. > I think that if this "email etiquette" thing costs us developer > participation, > we're making a questionable choice. > These are the key points IMO. Look, I more or less agree on all the moral questions here. Big tech is evil and not including full history in every reply should be at least an automatic setting, But am I going to switch email clients? No, and it's not a reasonable expectation. The *actual* question here, which I don't see most replies in this thread addressing, is not what Google should do or whether it's morally virtuous to not use their products, but what you want people like me to do if we have something to contribute to the conversation but I'm on my phone and have 3 minutes. Because manually deleting history on my phone is annoying enough that I just won't bother to reply. I had always thought one of the biggest selling points of FOSS was configurability and extensibility. Collapsing or removing the automatically included thread history is the sort of job that software should be doing, not fallible, habit-prone human users. It sucks that Google owns the world and they clearly aren't going to add a setting to remove the automatic history from replies. I don't see why FOSS archiving or client software can't be configured to remove the reply history from messages received. Adding a special case to handle interoperability with badly behaved proprietary systems isn't a concession to the forces of evil, it's a confirmation of the virtues of FOSS. And it's something FOSS projects (or at least, the successful ones) have been doing as long as I can remember.
