Re: *** ADMIN: Posting a new message

Adam Glauser wrote:

Actually, I think there are quite a few considerations here. Have you ever seen the way some mail clients mangle really long subject lines? I can try to hunt down an example if you like. Not only that, but there's the RE: AW: RE: AW: problem, not to mention character set considerations.

And every consideration could be handled. For example, RE: AW: is against RFC. You're not supposed to use AW:. But how hard would it be to code for it? Not hard at all, I reckon. Limit the number of characters to check to about 40. Not sure that character sets would really come into play when comparing two subject lines for equality. I really think this *could* be done at the list server level. Not sure that's the optimal place, though. I still think the email client should give the user more control over the field and/or not populate the field when the user changes the subject.

This has been discussed before, and neither subject-only nor message-ID-only is perfect. Personally, I don't think that starting a new thread by making a new message is too much of a burden.

I think it's silly that we have to do it, is all. All of this technology, and you can't do a reply-to and change the subject. Maybe it's not "too much" of a burden, but there's no reason it should be a burden at all.

OTOH, it would be nice if there were an option on the email client to do the same thing. I'm surprised Thunderbird at least doesn't have this. Hmm...

I think it does by default: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Stop_threading_by_subject

No, I mean a checkbox on the email client when you hit reply-to to say "treat this as a new message". It would clear the Message-ID field. Or perhaps an option to say "if the subject changes, treat it as a new message". I just find it frustrating that this hasn't been fixed. But who knows, maybe I'll find some free time and try to hack it in myself.

Anyway, David does what he can with the tools he's got, and I've trained myself to add new messages rather than reply to old ones. But I hate that I have to change the way I work to help the software, rather than it work the way I do.

Joe