You know your fighting a dead battle if your talking about MUA's that are starting new threads via the Subject: Field. If (god forbid) I fired up windows and used thebat! you would see rather nice little Re: , Re[1]: , Re[2]: , Re:[3]: , Re[4]: in there. Technically in my opinion this would be a better method of threading since each message is a seperate thing, and why not have a seperate number reflect that fact. Most folks accept the fact a Re: is inserted on most lists around the world in most languages. You might also see a bunch of PGP signatures and at least 1 cut line (tearline) and at least 4 lines, possibly 6 lines of what ever I wanted to put in. If that is my business phone, my pgp key number (since I have more than 10 keys) or whatever else maybe I just want to advertise a website or a bbs. See now that I have discussed more than just the subject field technically I could change the subject to reflect say: Re: [SLE] mail threading (Advertizing and Tearlines) Now if your talking about changing the entire subject, sometimes that is just as valid a move, it depends on what is being discussed. If it is just a thread and the thread changes, then why no change the Subject field to reflect that. On the other hand, if you don't like the Subject field then it's easy enough to change it yourself and create a new thread to more properly reflect the subject matter. What I noticed on this list which does not change is the address in the From Field. and that leads me to believe that it would be quite simple to create a filter to just trash the messages that you do not like to see. Some MTA's and MUA's are smart enough to even delete messages off the server before they reach any of you mbox's. By the way there is more information about the Subject field if you read the RFC's. I don't think it's anyone's right to get annoyed about the Subject field, it isn't annoying behavior. Anyone remember Fidonet and "Annoying Behavior?" Routing is annoying, Foul language is anoying, But subject lines? Remember That Sometimes the Subject line in a new thread can be a good thing. Say when you have found the answer to a problem, For example: Re[8]: my bla bla is broken (FIXED!!!) One might be more apt to read a message body with that subject if they were in a hurry or searching for an answer. What I find more annoying is Advertisements. For example: ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Small business owners... Tell us what you think! http://us.click.yahoo.com/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> ============ ============ To Post a message, send it to: Ihateadvertizing@eGroups.com To Unsubscribe, send a blank message to: Ihateadvertizing@eGroups.com Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ Unless you get a lot of people to agree with you then your not going to get the RFC changed, and until you have a moderatro start posting a bunch of rules once a week and kicking people off the lists your probably just going to have to live with it. You could impose a bunch of strict rules on people but you are very likely to both chase the people away and create yourself a PR nightmare. Too many rules can make a mail list quite unpleasant, and possibly even censored. (try sending Dr. Laura an email) Unless you have infinate funding then you can deal with PR pretty easy by throwing money at the problem like many others do. I can tell you my friend I hope that day doesn't come, because I will be the first to find an alternative. Even if I have to make a Regexp to filter out the crap example I made above... So be it. I hope you don't take this the wrong way, it's just some things I have noticed in the few short years I have had a computer. It was meant to help understand why people do what they do. On Friday 03 August 2001 01:27 am, you wrote:
Or at least remove the In-Reply-To: header field manually, if they do it with reply.
Which I don't think is an option in Kmail 2.1.2 (which I use). Which in turn leads me to suggest the simplest solution, that generally *will* work to solve this:
Just don't start a new thread by replying to an old one :)
On a sidenote: I'd actually been meaning to ask about this whole threading-business in Kmail, since I've seen these (seemingly random) subthreads appearing...
Looks like I got the answer :)
Jon Clausen