[n5bb]

Going back to the topic described by the original post and title of this thread:

• When you choose the Fastmail web or app feature “Group messages with their replies”, the Fastmail system which renders the message thread for viewing does several things:
  • Messages in any folder are shown, no matter which folder you have navigated to.
  • The messages are shown in time order. I believe it’s the order received at the Fastmail server.
  • An attempt is made to hide message content which was quoted by the sender. You can see the hidden content using the “Show quoted text” button.
• All of these effects are produced only in the user interface you see in the Fastmail app or website. On an email client you may see some of none of these effects.
• I can’t imagine how Fastmail could easily forward these messages in the same manner you see them in the user interface as a single email. Maybe the main content of each message (before the “Show quoted text” button in the user interface) could be concatenated and formatted as if you separately forwarded each message, but this would be difficult. My guess is that it would turn out to be a big mess unless a lot of work was done, and you would probably still get duplicated or out of order text. Complicating the situation is that some people insert comments after a line or section of a message. Combining all of the possible reply styles and the added complication of those who copy and paste from other emails or rearrange content make it very difficult to create a single seamless combination of the individual emails. That’s why the Fastmail display shows each individual email with apparently quoted content hidden by the “Show quoted text” button.
• But there is one solution which works in some cases.
  • Open Fastmail in more than one browser window or tab.
  • In one tab, reply or forward based on the latest message in the thread.
  • Using the other window or tab view of the message thread as a reference, copy and paste content into the new message you are creating. You can even use Reply or Forward to format the old messages, then copy and paste the results into the new message.
  • Yes, this is difficult. But you can get the exact results so that the forwarded message contains all of the important information. You could even start out by selecting each of the original messages and using the Forward as Attachment feature to get all of the original content (including attachments on the original messages) into your forward, then copy/paste text into the body to emphasize the important content to the recipient(s) of the combined forward.
  • The key Fastmail feature which makes this possible is opening several instances of Fastmail in different browser windows or tabs.
• You might also consider how hard it would be to copy this complete EMD thread into one message. The only way to get all of the thread content is to reply to the thread (as I am now) and trying to copy the displayed HTML. Due to HTML formatting for display (such as paging) it would be very difficult unless you copied a display image as a PNG or other image file.

Bill