Hello. Probably most of you know that e-mail messages contain, in their metadata, a unique message identifier and also the unique message identifier of the responded message, if any. These identifiers allow the automatic hierarchic organization of messages into threads.
Sometimes in this list, messages that start a new subject, actually are "responds" to other unrelated messages (even several years old). That is unlogical, has no advantage, breaks the sense of the threads and makes reading the list more difficult. For example, the recent announcement of the 16th Sinclair QL Italian meeting is a "respond" to the announcement of the 15th meeting (posted in 2018-10), which was a "respond" to the announcement of the QDOS/SMS reference manual 4.1 (posted in 2016-09). And then, three days later, the announcement of SMSQ/E 3.35 is a "respond" to the announcement of the 16th Italian meeting... As a result, without reason, both recent and interesting announcements belong to (and are "hidden" in) a thread started more than three years ago, and therefore they don't appear as two independent new threads at the top of the current hierarchy of messages in 2020-02, as they should. I know some webmail services don't care about the message identifiers and use the subject fields instead in order to recreate and display the threads, but that's not the way e-mail is supposed to work. Perhaps that is the reason some users don't realise the trouble caused by writing a new message by "replying" to whatever previous unrelated message, instead of writing an actual new message. Changing the subject in a thread only makes sense when the actual respond naturally leads to a different topic, but there's a helpful convention to mark that cases: "Re: New subject (Was: Old subject)". Please remember a basic rule of e-mail (lists) etiquette: New subject, new message; only respond to a message if you actually want to respond to what that message contains. Thank you in advance. Kind regards. -- Marcos Cruz http://programandala.net _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List
