Unfortunately not all mailers will thread by subject, though this would be the most obvious solution! (My mail program is called Mutt, and though it looks like it's supposed to allow that, I've never seen it work.)
I forgot to mention that deleting the In-Reply-To header manually *is* sufficient to avoid this problem, but that is not made easy by most mail programs either. Anyway, sorry for the bandwidth. :) On Wed, Jan 07, 2009 at 10:51:16AM -0500, David Poehlman wrote: > I don't make this assumption and I don't use threading but I do take > your point. It amounts to the same thing though. I'll probably alter > my reply behavior as a result of this info sometimes anyway but consider > that it is often more difficult than it may at first seem to do what you > suggest. you have to either know or have the address of the list you are > sending to to effect a new message based on your instructions. Believe > it or not, this is not the case often enough that folk just hit reply > instead of starting a new "thread. Can't you just thread by subject? > > On Jan 7, 2009, at 10:43 AM, Doug Lee wrote: > > Actually, my point in writing was not political; it was to alert > people to something about the way mailers work. I'm not sure what > your "lead, follow, or get out of the way" has to do with the subject, > though I know the saying well. > > This is not about changing subject lines. It is about using the Reply > command instead of the command to generate a new message. As I said > initially, the subject line often doesn't affect this issue anyway. > That's what I thought some people might not know. > > On Wed, Jan 07, 2009 at 10:37:34AM -0500, David Poehlman wrote: >> There is a saying, lead, follow or get out of the way. If you don't >> want to miss something, make sure you don't miss it. Whilest I agree >> that it would be nice if subject lines were changed to fit a new >> subject, the real world does not follow this practice so we just have >> to >> live with it instead of wastiing bandwidth talking about it. An >> alternative is to examine each thread and change the subject line >> yourself ut that doesn't work either because people will still be >> responding to the original thread. >> >> On Jan 7, 2009, at 10:09 AM, Doug Lee wrote: >> >> I see this happen on a lot of mailing lists, but I just spotted a >> 13-message thread on this list in which several totally different >> subjects were discussed. >> >> Some mail readers "can thread" mail such that all messages that are >> replies to each other appear as a single entry in the list of >> messages. I do this to speed mail handling, since I get hundreds of >> emails a day. I will see the subject line of the first message and >> the number of messages that follow from it. If I delete, I will >> delete the entire thread, with the assumption that it is all about the >> shown subject. >> >> If you use the Reply function of your mailer to start a new topic, >> chances are I and several other people will never even know about your >> message because it will show up as just another part of the thread you >> actually hit Reply on. Example: If you want to ask how to >> right-click with VoiceOver, but for convenience, you do it by replying >> to a message entitled "How well does Fusion work?" I'll just notice a >> multi-message thread called "How well does Fusion work?" If I don't >> want to read about Fusion, I'll delete that thread never knowing you >> tossed a completely different subject into it. >> >> Note that changing the subject line is not enough. Mail programs put >> an "In-Reply-To" header into a message when you use Reply, and that's >> how messages are threaded in most mailers that do threading. >> >> So in summary, don't use Reply if you're starting a new topic, or some >> of us won't even see your message. I know Reply is convenient, but >> its use when you're not really replying might cause inconvenient side >> effects. >> >> >> >> >> > > -- > > > > --
