Printed emails as handouts for tabletop RPGs

Somebody printed this email and kept it, which is already a clue. A printout is how an email leaves the screen and reaches the table: the subject, who wrote to whom and when, the attachment nobody opened, and under the reply the earlier message that everyone forgot was still quoted there.

What the printout carries

The mail service and the account it was printed from, the subject, the sender, the recipients and anyone copied in, the date, a warning banner if the mail system added one, the attachments with their sizes, the message and its signature, and the earlier message quoted below it under its “On Monday, … wrote:” line. The browser’s print date, the page title and the address sit in the margins, the way they do on a real printout. The message and the quote share what room the page has, and both shrink to fit before anything runs off the foot.

Four mail clients

A modern webmail printout with the attachments at the foot; an office client’s printout under the account holder’s name, the headers in a table and an external-sender warning above the message; a late-1990s dial-up client in plain text, where the quote comes first and every line of it starts with >; and a starship’s terminal, amber on black. All four are A4 at 300 DPI. Before there was email, the same news came as a Message on paper or, when it could not wait, as a Telegram.