Re: [Ql-Users] E-mail etiquette: New subject, new message
Hi Marcus, +1. I raised this some time ago too. It made no difference sadly, however, your point about some web mail browsers using the subject to group messages makes sense. I hadn't thoughtbabout that. I use Thunderbird and it uses the message id, and the problem you mention drives me nuts! But I'm quite easily annoyed ;-) Hopefully, it will stop. Sadly, I doubt it will. People at work do it too - then get upset because they replied to messages our team are deleting with a rule. Oops! Here's hopeing Cheers, Norm. -- Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity. ___ QL-Users Mailing List
Re: [Ql-Users] E-mail etiquette: New subject, new message
A lot of people simply dont know this because they never view their mails by thread. I know I didnt, until I was told off about this some years ago. (I hope Ive managed to behave since then!) On this list there also used to be a convention to top- or tail- reply (I can no longer remember which 'cause I do it so rarely these days) Tony Firshman used to ball us out regularly for misbehaving wrt this. As anyone who tries to write programs for the QL "that just work out of the box" knows only too well, educating the general QLing public is a soul-destroying task. I guess we are a particularly idiosyncratic lot! Id like to do better, truly I would. I can only keep trying ;o) Per On 08/02/2020 21:01, Marcos Cruz via Ql-Users wrote: 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. ___ QL-Users Mailing List
[Ql-Users] E-mail etiquette: New subject, new message
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
