[MPlayer-users] How to reply on a mailing list

[Jan Knutar]

On Saturday 05 June 2004 20:44, Jurriaan wrote:

> Or reply, so that a 'Re: ' is added in front of the subject and
> everybody will be able to see all your messages are to be grouped
> together.

Then there are the people who manage to reply with a Re in the subject 
line, but without the Refereces header, breaking threading for those of 
us who use clients with that capability. I can't believe that Opera M2 
is that broken, although I haven't tested.

The general guideline is though:

If you are posting a new message, that is not a reply, then DO NOT use 
the reply button and delete the subject line. That connects the message 
to the old thread you were in when you hit reply.

For example:

[ Bug in mplayer ]
-> [ Re: Bug in Mplayer ]
    -> [ Hi how to install plz kthx ]
[ Mplayer ate my marshmallows! ]
-> [ Re: Drugs should be banned (Was: Mplayer ate my marshmallows!)]

In this example the user hit reply to start a new thread, the how to 
install one, but his message ended up as a reply to the second message 
in the bug thread, because that's where he hit reply.

If you are posting a reply, do not use the new message button. This 
makes every reply appear as a new thread, which is confusing for those 
that want to group messages into threads.

For example, instead of having...:

+[ Bug in mplayer ]
+[ MPlayer ate my marshmallows ]

Which gives you quick overlook of the topics being currently discussed, 
and makes it easy and fast to find the message you might be looking 
for, you get something like:

[ Bug in mplayer ]
[ Re: Drugs should be banned (Was: Mplayer ate my marshmallows!) ]
[ Re: Bug in Mplayer ]
[ Mplayer ate my marshmallows! ]
[ Re: Bug in Mplayer ]
[ Hi how to install plz kthx ]

Which is less manageable and harder to overview and use, not to mention 
that unless you jump from message to message out of order manually, 
you'll be reading the messages in pretty much random order, opposed to 
the more logical of reading all the message in one thread, in the order 
they connect in the thread.

There's of course then also software which is inherently broken, such as 
some webmails, which are simply impossible to force to behave 
correctly. Expect people to get annoyed if you use one of those.