I started watching Hacks the other day. Kinda fun show. There was a scene where Ava and her agent are talking and Ava had gotten an email that included a bunch of other emails in a thread and it revealed some detail to Ava she wasn’t supposed to know. Barely important to the plot at all, I just noticed because it was about email and my brain is ridiculous that way. The agent says “Yeah email is tricky”. I couldn’t even tell if it was a joke or a sympathetic quip.
It happened to me the other day. I was emailing back and forth a bunch with a third-party company trying to sort out an issue. Someone included me on what was another related thread about the issue, so I got to see the entire quoted history of that conversion, which seemed like it had some messages in there potentially not meant for my eyes. Nothing earth shaking, but one of them got an OH. Really. response from my brain.
My guess is the person typing my email into a cc or whatever didn’t even think about the thread history. They just wanted me to see a new message they were typing.
It has me thinking… is this obvious? Part of me feels like it is, and part of me feels like it isn’t. Almost like the UI of the email app you use can make it go one way or the other. But it’s also one of those things that if you screw it up badly enough once, that will probably be the last time.
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