On 7/28/2011 5:01 PM, Spiro Harvey wrote:
the thing is that not all mail clients will set the in-reply-to headers, whuch is why clients like thunderbird, evolution and mutt will use the subject line as well to thread messages.
Apple Mail does that too and it makes the threading unusable IMO.
If the clients are too dumb to adhere to a convention, I don't believe it's our job to baby them.
Personally, I like the idea of the [SOLVED] tags because they can indicate when help is no longer needed.
However, I also like the way the Sun Managers list does (did? it's been many years since I used it), but they basically said, post a question, work it out, then post a new SOLVED thread outlining the solution.
While that would probably be a bit too formal for this list, it was a fantastic way of learning things. And having the solved thread made searching through archives way easier. Find a problem related to yours, then look for the SOLVED post. If you needed more detail, you went back to the main thread and read all the posts to see how they came to that conclusion.
Heck, I'd settle for people coming back to a "problem / issue" thread and updating on how or what the actual problem was or what they did to get the thing to work properly.
So often you'll see a thread talking about trying X, Y & Z, then the person having the problem never responds back as to whether X, Y or Z worked. Which is especially troublesome a year or two later when you're digging through threads in GMane trying to find a solution to a particular issue.
(Pet peeve of the day -- dead end threads on mail lists.)