The Problem
When customers reply to email conversations, their email client includes the entire previous thread below their new message — as virtually every email client does by default. Intercom's Inbox renders this quoted trail fully expanded, inline, for every single message in the conversation. The result is that a 6-reply email thread becomes an endlessly scrolling wall of duplicated text, where the same content is repeated over and over, growing exponentially with each reply.
This makes it genuinely painful to work through email-based tickets. Instead of quickly scanning the latest reply at the top and moving on, agents have to scroll past pages of repeated content just to orient themselves. Multiply that across dozens or hundreds of tickets a day and you're looking at a real productivity hit — not to mention the mental fatigue of parsing the same text blocks repeatedly.
Why This Is Frustrating
Every major email client and nearly every competing helpdesk platform handles this gracefully. Gmail, Outlook, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Help Scout — they all detect the quoted text delimiter and collapse it behind a simple "show quoted text" toggle or ellipsis. It's a solved problem. It has been a solved problem for over a decade.
The fact that Intercom still displays raw, fully expanded email trails in 2026 is baffling. This isn't a complex engineering challenge. Email clients universally use standard markers for quoted text (> prefixes, --- Original Message --- delimiters, etc.). Detecting and collapsing these behind an expandable toggle is straightforward — it's the kind of thing a single engineer could prototype and ship in a day.
What We'd Expect
- Quoted email trail text should be collapsed by default in the Inbox conversation view.
- A simple "Show quoted text" or expand toggle (like Gmail's ellipsis
...) should let agents reveal the full trail when they actually need context. - This should apply to all inbound email messages where quoted/forwarded content is detected.
The Impact
This affects every single team that handles email-based conversations or tickets in Intercom. It's not an edge case — it's the core workflow. For teams processing high volumes of email tickets, the lack of this basic functionality adds up to hours of wasted scrolling and lost focus every week.
This feels like the definition of a quick win: low complexity, high impact, long overdue. We'd love to see it prioritized.
