[Elecraft] OT: How to reply to a thread, and why it's important

[John D'Ausilio]

Sorry for the spam, but I quit smoking tobacco last week and I'm in a
foul mood, and this is one of my pet peeves (along with HTML mail) ..

<minor rant>
Those who use a threading mail program (Gmail is a great example) see
a thread as a group of messages all clumped together to make it easy
to read in context. You've probably noticed that often times a reply
to a thread will show up at the top level rather than in it's
sequential place in the thread .. creating a new, different thread
than the original. Then some people might reply to the "new" thread
while others reply to the original thread .. maybe yet another "new"
thread gets created. Ever wonder why?

Well, it's because some people do not use the "Reply" button, but
rather copy/past a subject line into a new email and post that. Seems
sensible at first blush, but doing so breaks threads .. bad netiquette
and unnecessary to boot. The key is in the (generally invisible) mail
headers. Every email has 'em, and you can make them visible in all
email clients one way or another (in gmail click on the little
dropdown box at the top left of any message and "View Original"). The
headers of interest for this topic are the Message-ID, In-Reply-To and
References headers.

Here's some of the headers from a recent top thread message on the
Elecraft list:

Message-ID: <2464.48353.qm at web81302.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Date: Wed, 5 Mar 2008 18:08:28 -0800 (PST)
To: Elecraft Reflector <elecraft at mailman.qth.net>
From: Lee Buller <k0wa at swbell.net>
Subject: [Elecraft] K3:  Stereo Speakers - What are you using?

And here's the relevant headers from it's first reply:

Message-ID: <CE.C6.01039.8685FC74 at smtp08.embarq.synacor.com>
Date: Wed, 05 Mar 2008 20:38:21 -0600
To: Lee Buller <k0wa at swbell.net>, elecraft at mailman.qth.net
From: Tom Hammond <n0ss at embarqmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Elecraft] K3:  Stereo Speakers - What are you using?
In-Reply-To: <2464.48353.qm at web81302.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
References: <2464.48353.qm at web81302.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

Notice how the In-Reply-To header from Tom's reply has the Message-ID
from Lee's original message? That, dear friends, is the key to
threading .. and those headers are only generated when you hit the
"Reply" button! When a user tries to get around the Reply button for
whatever reason, those headers are not generated and the thread is
broken..

So .. please use Reply often and responsibly, and help clean up all
the broken threads. It's true that reckless use of Reply (and Reply
All) can result in embarrasing situation when mail which is intended
to be private ends up on a list, but you should always examine the
generated reply before hitting Send anyway :)
</minor rant>

Have a great day, everyone!
de w1rt/john