Re: mea máxima culpa

[David Kastrup]

Carl Peterson <address@hidden> writes:

> On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 1:46 PM, Kieren MacMillan <
> address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> > I have no idea how your email system would figure out just what
>> > mail Tim had been replying to.  The information is just not there
>> > in the headers.
>>
>> Apple Mail uses the Subject (as text), and I imagine there are other
>> applications that do the same.  This of course leads to any number of
>> frustrations, including "re: re: test" not being threaded with "re:
>> test", and mail from completely different conversations (with the
>> same subject line) being threaded together.
>
> Gmail is just that smart. It primarily uses the subject line, though I
> think it pays attention to some other things, as I can't recall having
> the problem Kieren describes. I think Gmail also looks for
> similarities in the body of the message. It has some awareness of how
> the body of a message is structured, as it commonly hides signature
> blocks (including the lilypond-user mailing list block)

I'm certain Gmail will also be able to figure out the mail you are
replying to without referring to any header at all as long as any Gmail
user has not yet deleted it (and probably even afterwards).  But for a
normal mail server/client setup not relying on a universal freely
associating data kraken on the server end, one needs to have information
as specific as a Message Id in order to do reliable queries.

> Regarding the actual subject matter, my previously-voiced frustration
> is that the individual messages are *not* set up to reply to the list
> by default.

Don't use "Reply to sender" if you don't want to reply to the sender.

> As a matter of consistency, I think both the individual
> messages and the digest should reply to the list, or neither.

Do you mean to imply that the digest _does_ add an explicit Reply-To:
header and it goes to the list?  That would indeed be on the less than
sane side.

-- 
David Kastrup