Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand why this isn't configurable. Why can't the basic data structures (of one email after another in serial) be displayed in either order depending on mail client settings? Admittedly I haven't looked into it because I'm perfectly fine with top posted emails. But I routinely sort files in my directory. Why not emails in a displayed thread?
As the other comment mentioned, the email body contains the entire quote chain. The way clients accomplish threaded display is a combination of: - parsing the unstructured email body and looking for quote levels, html formatting and printed email heads - parsing certain headers like message-id, in-reply-to, dkim sig - looking for sections of the message body in the inbox This is done because there is nothing in the p…
I came up with a routine to parse and translate about 2-3GB of saved emails into MBox format once.
The official delimiter is unbelievable, IMHO.
« the exact character sequence of "From", followed by a single Space character (0x20), an email address of some kind, another Space character, a timestamp sequence of some kind, and an end-of-line marker. »
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4155
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox
That's it. An email is a section of text beginning with
From $something
That's the spec.