[GRASS-dev] Email subject standards

Hi Michael and others,

please note that changing subject when you reply an email breaks the email thread, so then there are two threads instead of one.

Even adding some words to the subject line is usually considered as a change, so it creates a new thread.

Keeping one topic with one subject is better because it works well with Mozilla Thunderbird Conversations, Gmail conversations and most importantly with Pipermail/Mailman archive [1]. It does help Gmane or Nabble too (although Nabble seems to handle some cases).

Tickets also have the same name even when they are solved or there is some progress. Moreover, they have number, so they are archived in the right way even when the name was changed. But the only identifier for emails is the subject, so we should keep it unless the topic changed.

If we all agree about it, we might consider writing some (short) instructions somewhere.

Vaclav

[1] http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-dev/2013-October/thread.html

Vaclav wrote:

please note that changing subject when you reply an
email breaks the email thread, so then there
are two threads instead of one.

Even adding some words to the subject line is
usually considered as a change, so it
creates a new thread.

Hi,

it depends on your software, many email clients and online archives know about & use email header lines to signify the relationships regardless of the subject line. Other email clients ignore all that and simply go by the strict subject line or their own fuzzy intelligence sorting method (eg gmail?).

see for example

http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html

http://people.dsv.su.se/~jpalme/ietf/message-threading.html

regards,
Hamish

Vaclav Petras wrote:

please note that changing subject when you reply an email breaks the email
thread, so then there are two threads instead of one.

If the mail client uses the Subject header to identify threads, that's
a defect in the mail client.

What *does* break threading is using a mail client which doesn't set
the In-Reply-To or References headers when sending a reply.

For more details, see RFC 2822:

  http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2822.txt

--
Glynn Clements <glynn@gclements.plus.com>