[NCLUG] Email Threading (was: ZFS RAID-Z2 for /home on Ubuntu 12.04)

Bob Proulx bob at proulx.com
Sun Aug 11 16:06:49 MDT 2013


Hi Phil,

Phil Marsh wrote:
> Subject: Re: [NCLUG] ZFS RAID-Z2 for /home on Ubuntu 12.04
> I have another question...

The next time you start a new topic of discussion please simply write
a new message not a reply.  Here you replied to Brian's message in the
phpmyadmin thread and simply changed the subject line.  That does not
start a new topic!  That simply causes your reply to be threaded into
the previous phpmyadmin discussion as a reply to Brian's message.
This is usually called thread stealing or thread hijacking.

You can see this by looking in the mailing list archive:
  http://lists.nclug.org/pipermail/nclug/2013-August/thread.html

Starting a new message is to your advantage because it starts a new
thread.  Let's say a ZFS expert is reading the mailing list and sees
the phpmyadmin thread, thinks, I don't know or care about phpmyadmin,
and kills that thread.  Your ZFS question will be killed along with
it.  The ZFS expert would never see your ZFS question.

I know you are using Yahoo mail and I don't know much about it.  I
know that Gmail users won't realize this because Gmail doesn't sort by
threads.  Gmail  sorts by subject line.  So changing the subject
causes Gmail to sort it into a different thread.  Does Yahoo?  It is a
shame that these popular very mailers can't play well with others.

Conversely the opposite is also true.  If someone is wanting to reply
to an existing discussion then they should most definitely follow-up
to the existing message.  And if it is drift on that discussion it is
good and recommended practice to change the subject appropriately as I
did with this message.  Sometimes we have people who always start a
new message each and every time they email.  That is also bad but in
reverse!  Then it is hard to follow the discussion because it is
spread out over so many different threads.

Bob


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