Sorry for the spam, but I quit smoking tobacco last week and I'm in a foul mood, and this is one of my pet peeves (along with HTML mail) ..
<minor rant> Those who use a threading mail program (Gmail is a great example) see a thread as a group of messages all clumped together to make it easy to read in context. You've probably noticed that often times a reply to a thread will show up at the top level rather than in it's sequential place in the thread .. creating a new, different thread than the original. Then some people might reply to the "new" thread while others reply to the original thread .. maybe yet another "new" thread gets created. Ever wonder why? Well, it's because some people do not use the "Reply" button, but rather copy/past a subject line into a new email and post that. Seems sensible at first blush, but doing so breaks threads .. bad netiquette and unnecessary to boot. The key is in the (generally invisible) mail headers. Every email has 'em, and you can make them visible in all email clients one way or another (in gmail click on the little dropdown box at the top left of any message and "View Original"). The headers of interest for this topic are the Message-ID, In-Reply-To and References headers. Here's some of the headers from a recent top thread message on the Elecraft list: Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Wed, 5 Mar 2008 18:08:28 -0800 (PST) To: Elecraft Reflector <[email protected]> From: Lee Buller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [Elecraft] K3: Stereo Speakers - What are you using? And here's the relevant headers from it's first reply: Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Wed, 05 Mar 2008 20:38:21 -0600 To: Lee Buller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [email protected] From: Tom Hammond <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [Elecraft] K3: Stereo Speakers - What are you using? In-Reply-To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> References: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Notice how the In-Reply-To header from Tom's reply has the Message-ID from Lee's original message? That, dear friends, is the key to threading .. and those headers are only generated when you hit the "Reply" button! When a user tries to get around the Reply button for whatever reason, those headers are not generated and the thread is broken.. So .. please use Reply often and responsibly, and help clean up all the broken threads. It's true that reckless use of Reply (and Reply All) can result in embarrasing situation when mail which is intended to be private ends up on a list, but you should always examine the generated reply before hitting Send anyway :) </minor rant> Have a great day, everyone! de w1rt/john _______________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Post to: [email protected] You must be a subscriber to post to the list. Subscriber Info (Addr. Change, sub, unsub etc.): http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/subscribers.htm Elecraft web page: http://www.elecraft.com
