David, we make the world what it is. To me this is a sign of
laziness or simply well-intentioned peeps perhaps not having enough
time to do a 'proper' reply, which is fine. However, I think Doug's
request was a completely fair one, and a welcome one too. <smile>
Just because it seems many people may fight change / learning /
growing, because they feel it may be too hard or uncomfortable,
doesn't mean it's a bad idea to politely / humbly / honestly request
it a little! lol!
One simple silly little change can make the entire world a better
place, afterall!
Have a terrific day!…
Smiles,
Cara :)
On Jan 7, 2009, at 7:37 AM, 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.
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