Hello Doug,
Thank you for pointing this out. I'm sure there are lots of people who
are unaware of this problem and some of their important questions may
go unanswered because the person with the answer has deleted the
thread in which the question was posed. I' for instance, delete all
messages relating to Windows on the Mac since I don't use Windows and
know nothing about it.
It's very easy to type in the address of any list as long as you know
the first few letters of the address since Mail will autocomplete.
Cheers,
Anne
On Jan 7, 2009, at 4:43 PM, 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.
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