An Open Letter To E-Mail Clients That Default to Starting Your Reply Below Message (I’m Looking at you, Thunderbird)

The computer that I use has been acting up lately, so I did a complete reinstall of the OS. After all the OS updates, I installed Mozilla’s e-mail client, Thunderbird. I’ve used Thunderbird for the last few years, and have been pleased with its interface, and… well, it’s an e-mail client, there isn’t too much to gush about. After installing, I hit reply on an e-mail and what do I see? Thunderbird’s default “reply” setting is to “Start your reply below” original message.

What’s up with that?

Seriously, why would they do that? I have a hard time even understanding why this is an option, let alone the default option. For those of you that have no idea what I’m talking about, I’ve taken screen capture of my correspondence with The Sea Captain. (click picture to enlarge)

Normally, when you’re reading the history of an e-mail trail, you start at the bottom… but NO, Mozilla thinks it’s a good idea to confuse the hell out of people. In my simple example, the chronology of the note (top to bottom) goes 3, 1, 2… but you probably figured that out, since there were only two replies. Now, imagine a long series of back and forths with 3-4 associates.

Lame.

 

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