List etiquette

[William O'Higgins Witteman]

On Fri, Mar 03, 2006 at 07:51:41PM -0500, Chris Aitken wrote:

>What is 'threading'? I know what top-posting is but not threading...

Threading is arranging emails by thread, which is to say, arranged
chronologically by relationship.

That's not super clear, so here's an example.

I write a message, "nnnn".  You respond to this message, and the subject
is typically "re: nnnn".  Someone responds to you, and (often) the
subject of that email is also "re: nnnn".  Lastly, someone else wants to
start a new subject, and responds to the person who responded to you,
but changes the subject to "yyyy".  In a threaded display of this
exchange, you're mailbox would look something like this:

me          nnnn
you         └─>re: nnnn
someone       └─>re: nnnn
someone else    └─>yyyy

This is why sometimes you see people admonishing people not to reply and
change the subject when starting a new topic.  The original problem I
was alluding to, is someone whose mailer is creating new Reply-To
headers for messages that are actually replies.  That would look like
this:

me                nnnn
you               └─>re: nnnn
someone             └─>re: nnnn
someone else          └─>yyyy
.
.
.
a bunch of other messages, in chronological order by thread
.
.
.
brokenmailerguy   re: nnnn

Does that make sense?  For mailing lists or personal conversations with
iterations of emails, it makes a lot of sense to organize by thread,
rather than by date.  There are many email clients that permit
threading, but no all of them turn it on by default.  If you aren't
using threading, then you won't notice if your mailer (or anyone else's)
breaks this (admittedly fragile) structure.
-- 

yours,

William

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