[ubuntu-studio-devel] Why keeping the email thread is important and how to do it

Ralf Mardorf ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net
Mon Dec 21 20:20:42 UTC 2015


Hi list,

what is an email thread and why is it important especially on a
developer's mailing list?

Lets take a look at the mailing list archive of this month, sorted by
thread:

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-studio-devel/2015-December/thread.html#start

Please take the time and read the complete overview.

As you can see replies are not simply sorted by subject, but in
addition they are sorted by the mail the replies belong too.

Now let us select a thread that starts with a digest subject:

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-studio-devel/2015-December/007275.html

Scroll down to "Previous message" to read the messages that this reply
to the digest belongs too. As you can see, the thread is broken, the
link does not lead to the previous message.

If you take a look at the email headers by your MUA, you'll find
"References", "Message-ID" and "In-Reply-To", they provide information
about the thread.

Now please visit the following site, were mailing list subscription is
done, https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-devel.

The very first sentence is

"Please read community.ubuntu.com/contribute/support/mailinglists/ about
mailing etiquette."

Excerpts from the link mentioned by the first sentence:

"[snip] Write your email underneath the email which you are replying to
[snip] remove any unnecessary text
[snip] Avoid sending emails in HTML format
[snip] When replying to messages, use your email client’s Reply To
List function
[snip] When starting a new subject, do not reply to a previous email
[snip] Replying to digest emails breaks the threading
[snip]"

It is possible to reply to a digest without breaking threading and
also getting the correct subject by using MIME digest, as explained at
http://www.list.org/mailman-member/node28.html. I wonder that somebody
requests plain text digest and when replying to the plain text digest is
sending a multi part message containing HTML formatted text.

Please consider to discontinue this replying stile.

Regards,
Ralf



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