[Coco] Message Threading

John W. Linville linville at tuxdriver.com
Wed Aug 9 16:27:11 EDT 2017


On Wed, Aug 09, 2017 at 09:06:17AM -0700, Mark J. Blair wrote:
> 
> > On Aug 9, 2017, at 7:29 AM, John W. Linville <linville at tuxdriver.com> wrote:
> > 
> > So, just for clarity -- if you Reply to an existing message and then
> > change the Subject, you are not starting a new thread. In this case
> > you are literallly just "changing the subject" in the middle of an
> > ongoing conversation. That is rude both in real life and in email on
> > the Internet.
> 
> I agree that doing so is rude and annoying. I'm also observing
> the opposite issue, though. For example, the subject "Booting OS9
> on my CoCo 3" is presently appearing broken up into three threads
> in my MUA. I'm using Mail under macOS. Is my MUA broken in the way
> it combines messages into threads, or is something else happening
> that's making Mail thread messages in a correct but undesirable way?

I haven't paid much attention to those threads, so I'm only guessing
at what may be happening there. Most likely, it is indeed the opposite
of the problem -- instead of someone trying to start a new thread by
changing the Subject, they likely tried to continue an old thread by
using a matching Subject rather than by replying to a message already
in the thread. So in this case, instead of a new thread showing-up
in the middle of an old thread, you get a continuation of an old
thread's Subject on a new thread.

I agree that this practice is also a bit painful, but it is less
painful to me than the original complaint. Plus, for those using
digest mode, starting a new thread with the same Subject as an old
thread is likely their most reasonable option (without some clever
email header hacking).

John
-- 
John W. Linville		Someday the world will need a hero, and you
linville at tuxdriver.com			might be all we have.  Be ready.


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