Thanks a lot, Ted, for the good extensive explanation.
Let me try summarize, confirm and add a bit w/o repeating too much:
- If you get regular mailing list e-mails, and reply to
postings, any decent mail software will take the
'Message-Id:' header of the message you reply to, and
produce 'In-Reply-To:' and 'References:' headers from it,
and will add them to your own e-mail.
[ Most e-mail softwares keep these headers hidden, and quite a
few pieces of e-mail crapware don't even allow you to see these headers.]
{ And as Ted mentioned; unfortunately, we still have too many
r-help posters who **misuse** their e-mail-software's `reply'
and then inadvertently "hijack threads"... }
- Yes, the threads are *not* built from 'Subject:'s but rather
using the e-mail headers 'References:' and/or 'In-Reply-To:'
This is all based on international e-mail standards (RFC/..) mostly going
back into the age where most R-help readers have not ever used e-mail..
- With mailman, there are 2 ways to receive digests:
(1) "plain text" --- which is default, since some dumb e-mail
programs can only deal with those
(2) "MIME" --- which uses the MIME standard to send the digest.
With a good e-mail software, this means that you
get ``each message as attachment'' {that's how it
typically looks to the user}
which you then can open - in your mail software(!) -
and it will behave like a regular e-mail; it has a
(typically hidden) 'Message-ID:' etc
==> when replying to such a message you automatically
get both:
1) correct Subject
2) correct In-Reply-To + References ===> correct thread
*So* : What we (and many) recommend to all digest subscribers
is to activate the "MIME" option - on their mailing list
"membership info page" to where you get from
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
after entering your e-mail address at the very bottom of the
page (and then your list password).
-- but, as Michael Dewey just mentioned,
unfortunately there are (too many) pieces of e-mail crapware
around which even don't support the above correctly...
Martin Maechler,
ETH Zurich, provider of (most of) the mailing list infrastructure for R.
______________________________________________
[email protected] mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
