Ask HN: Anyone fancy working on an RFC for email replies?

1 pointsby lbriner3 lata temu1 comments

Automatic parsing of email messages is hard in places where the protocol has not kept up with the richness of email-based communications and one area that is particularly hard is separating replies from the main body of a message, which is usually quoted with the reply.

I think a new mime-type of message/reply would provide a much easier experience for those of us working with automated message processing. The text and html body can remain the same as they are now, but all replies would be added to a message as additional parts for easy parsing. This might have more useful applications than just easier extraction of replies, for instance, richer message thread views.

Anyone from MailGun, Mailjet, GMail, Yahoo, Amazon SES etc. interested in this or know of any existing efforts?

1 comments

gus_massa3 lata temu

Anecdote time: A long time ago, I parsed bounced emails to get the bad email adress. There were like 10 sligtly different formats that I detected automaticaly, and some outliers that I handle manually.

(Detecting replies looks like a harder problem.)