On Monday 14 October 2002 20:43, Graham Murray wrote: [...]
Therefore, MS Outlook and other Windows mail readers tend to default to that model of message trail handling.
NO they did not! What they did is analogous to exchanging letters by post and each correspondent photocopying the previous correspondence, adding their new material and sending it all in the envelope. Passing correspondence files around is fine within an office or even an organisation, but when sending letters it is more normal to put a reference to previous correspondence at the top of the letter. (In business) Both the sender and recipient maintain they own files containing the correspondence.
The traditional email paradigm follows this system. It contains "In-Reply-To:" and/or "References" headers which are analogous to the both the references at the top of (paper) mail and the index in
correspondence file. As both sender and recipient have (local) copies replies should only quote sufficient to give context rather than repeating the whole "bundle". "High Quality" mail readers
First off... I don't know where you do business, but in North America, actual letters have taken a back seat to e-mail. Letters still get sent, but much more rarely, and usually to formalize the culmination of big deals, or to recognize achievements. Otherwise, it's just e-mail for all day-to-day transactions inside and outside the company. I can look back over just the past week and see several examples in my office inbox of exactly the kind of incremental message handling that I described. A request for help comes in to our Customer Support group. It goes back and forth between the customer and our CS people, with the list expanding to include other people on the customer end. Then, when the scope of the problem is clear, and it has been established that the customer was not doing anything incorrect, the message -- with all the history in it -- gets circulated to a wider audience in our company. Our senior management and engineering decide that we can add the function that the customer wants, and that we might be able to fit it into the development schedule at such'n'such a time. Then, it goes back to the customer to see if they can agree to the timetable and to any cost that might be involved. At the customer, probably additional, more senior people are pulled in, and *they* want to know the history and the reasons behind what they are being asked to sign for. In another one, our Marketing people circulated a growing e-mail between themselves and a group of customers -- and some potential customers -- to decide on trade-show or seminar attendance, and who will present what. The recipient list grew every time the message was reposted. Then, there's another ever-growing message that came past me at least three times, between several of our people and several people at a testing lab. Each time, when new people are brought in, they look at the history and know what led to the current discussion. Maybe it's not the "right" way to do it, but it's easy and effective. That's how it's done in some *very* large corporate and government organizations -- who happen to be our customers. the maintain
the thread "tree" and allow the reader to easily refer back to previous correspondence.
Fine. I'll be glad to pass the word along. What is the mechanism by which correspondence among three people is expanded to 11 people, while conveying the history to all who join the conversation? That happens daily where I work. (No, it's not always the same three or the same eleven people, so it's not even remotely feasible to set up mailing lists for the situation.) If the method that you will detail is something of which Outlook is not capable (i.e., if it doesn't support some standard [nothing new for MS...]), then please just specify which reader-and-server combination we can switch to. Keep in mind that within our company, we get a LOT of use from Outlook's voting buttons, and a LOT of use from Outlook's shared calendars and resource scheduling functions. We also do a lot with forms... within Outlook. We might get along without them, but the office would be much less efficient. If we can show our people that there are similarly convenient functions available in Linux, we'll be more than half way to persuading them that it's ok to switch. Our IT dept (all three of them) will bless you). So, what's the poop? /kevin