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Why kernel development still uses email

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Re: Why kernel development still uses email

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Requiring a chrome extension limiting people to using chrome And people who use extensions. Beyond ad blocker on some machines I don't use extensions on principle because of security concerns.

Catehorically not using extensions, regardless of their permissions system, sounds less like "security concerns" and more like "fear rooted in ignorance." Continuing to use some of them (ad blockers), regardless of said "security concerns", sounds like cognitive dissonance.

If any single extension author is compromised you may be yourself but ads are also a malware vector thus the position is consistent.

Re: Why kernel development still uses email

#152
post #17

Email is an amazing tool. I don't understand the rush to get rid of it. It is a free standard with many implementations on both the client and server. It is exceptionally easy to manage email. Many servers have great systems for categorizing emails and storing them long-term. Email is fast. Everyone has one. There is this weird myth that Email magically kills productivity while Slack and GitHub don't. I never underst…

Email requires all participants to play nice and write their emails with subjects and quotes in a manner that other people and their mail clients can work with, read and understand.

However, many clients have different defaults and many people have different preferences.

Do I quote above or below? Does the subject line start with RE:, RE:RE:RE:? Maybe my client is setup in a different locale and the reply is prepended with SV: or what have you. Maybe a participant hates RE: and removes them from the subject line, or write the subject line as the main point of the reply.

I've never been able to setup a client to show me what is going on on a mailing list or show me nice tree structures that could help me follow the different branching a discussion goes off in. I often get mails in the middle of a discussion and can't trace it back, and read the thread from the beginning. And it is every client for himself and I'm the idiot for not having everything setup nicely and everybody else is smug about it.

The nice thing about closed standards is that all clients follow the same rules. When you click reply, you are replying to that message, no matter what you write in your subject line.

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