Expected behavior
When rendering a reply in a 1 to 1 chat, it should only contain a quote of the original message if the original was not the immediate previous message.
When the context of a message is already right above it, quoting it simply wastes space.
Actual behavior
Every reply from a contact contains a quote of my previous message. I think this is a recent change.
The contact was using regular email - I don’t know if that was relevant or not.
Steps to reproduce the problem
Send a message to a contact
Contact replies using a regular MUA
You see the reply containing a quote of your first message
in general, i think, leaving quotes out will result in loss of context, even in these simple cases.
eg. the recipient would not know if an answer refers to the “last message” or to the “last messages”, i think there are easily situations, that lead to misunderstandings.
also - would you show the quote on the composers side? if not, that might be unexpected. if you do, composer and recipient see different messages. same may happen in a multi-device-setup of the recipient, where messages arrive out-of-order. forwarding such quote-cutted messages might be another pool of failed user-expectations if quotes reappear magically - or context is lost completely.
so, not sure, if being smart here would be an overall improvement.
are there other messengers, leaving out quotes like that? if so, well, there might be some general user-expectation, yes.
finally, i also think, that senders will often reply without quoting when referring to the last message, so that issue is also mitigated by that - without all the side-effect.
but to the wasted screen space: i think, the quote in the example is unfortunate, indeed. only one line would be sufficient. this looks like something worth fixing
This happens because the message actually contains a quote of your message. Most likely your contact leaves bottom-quotes their MUA inserts automatically.
If we want to hide the quote in this case, we need to check if it actually contains unedited full text of the previous message, and it’s hard to do reliably thanks to line wrapping and various levels of format=flowed support.