What is irrelevant to one person is relevant to another. So by pruning down to what we think is important, we have removed context someone else added to the thread later may need. Long quoted sections of emails are ugly, but they do a great job of preserve the context for anyone to follow.

You make a good point about providing context to people added to the thread later, but it would still only provide partial context because people don't always reply to the most recent email in a thread.

Also it's quite common for multiple people in a thread to respond to the same email near simultaneously, or for people to reply to a message earlier in the timeline. This then creates branches in the message history. The conversation is then likely to settle again at some point on one of the branches and any recent additions to the CC list are still going to miss context.

Also at some time you have to consider that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one. Is it really useful to have a 5 word email nested 15 quotes and 1000 lines deep when 80% of the quoted lines are just signatures and disclaimers? The signal to noise ratio is just too low for it to be useful. I've just pulled up an email from a customer today and their signature has 33 lines, 133 words, and 1100 characters AFTER the name and company name. It even includes the email address which is the same as the address they used to send the message.

I know that when I'm added to such a thread that I'll generally just make a phone call to a colleague to get up to date rather than try to make sense of everything. I personally don't have the patience for it.

The irony of the whole thing is that this is what passes for professional communication today. The groups of misfits, slackers, and stoners I hung out with on the BBS's of the 90's had better online communication skills than today's corporate world.

Anyway sorry for ranting, it's not directed at you, it's directed at the eternal september that most of us live in now. Your point about preserving context is a good one I hadn't considered but I think some pruning would go a long way towards making that context more accessible and useful.

I can certainly see your point, but in my experience of late, email communication is rarely used to host lively communication. It's killer in this role was IRC, Slack, Discord, and other real-time communication channels. It's not until this live communication has come to a head that email is used to preserve the decisions and forward them to leadership or outside companies.

So while some intelligent pruning may be of use, it's been made much less valuable over time. I've been added to a few lengthy email chains late in the process, and the lack of pruning was not even really noticeable.

> It's killer in this role was IRC, Slack, Discord, and other real-time communication channels.

Yet, there isn't a single instant messaging client/platform that I know of that puts new messages at the top of the window instead of at the bottom.

I think the root of the problem is that people want to treat email as a chat client where only the few words or line at the top matter, and, conversely, people want to treat chat clients (i.e., Slack) like a discussion that needs threading where responses need to be associated with the text that it was in response to.

If there's any likelihood of others being added to an extended email conversation, it should have started in a messaging client where the new people can scroll back through the entire history.

Email is either a one-off group mail, or a conversation between one sender and one recipient. Any other case is for Slack/Skype/IRC/etc.

Emails weren't really meant for adding new participants to an existing discussion. Newsgroups, on the other hand, could handle this use case easily since previous posts could be seen by people who subscribed after they were made.