On 2026-02-17, meine via Mutt-users wrote: > Question here is whether you are going to adapt to some quirk in MS > Outlook, or just use mutt the way it is designed. There are a lot of > things where Microsoft software interpretes and displays things > differently from non-MS software. IMHO we shouldn't bow for that, nor > its users.
There have long been two different approaches to e-mail, one we could call "bussiness/corporate", given it tends to show more in these environments, although possibly just because Microsoft decided to go with that one, and one I would call the "Internet way", with citation marks, trimming and interleaved responses, and also a prevalence of text/plain and at most text/html, using MIME. And, even when you top-reply in this format, the quoted text is clearly marked as such. Now I'm probably overlooking a bunch of historical developments in how messages used to be formatted/laid long before Microsoft arrived at the e-mail scene... it's not like I've been doing any research into this (and if someone has or knows of some work which did, that'd be an interesting read, so please do share if you know of something). But the "compromise" here can't be to ditch the "Internet way" just because the other is what Microsoft has been selling to corporate users. RFC 1855 speaks about being "liberal in what you receive", but I'd argue that Microsoft in general often tests the boundaries of patience well beyond what's reasonable. -- Nuno Silva
