[ruby-core:17175] Re: Mail count in Subject

At 11:54 08/06/10, Urabe Shyouhei wrote:
>Warren Brown wrote:
>> For people
>> using Microsoft Outlook, the only real way to follow threads is to sort
>> on the subject.  With that broken, this mailing list becomes pretty
>> unreadable.

I'm not using Outlook, but I concur with Warren.


>That's a bug in Outlook, not our fault.

Sorry, but then the reason why some people claim that they need
the message number in the subject should also be called a bug in
their mail software, and not our fault.

And the fact that some people prefer to use screen real estate to
see the actual subject rather than a mechanically generated subject
number may be a bug in these people, or what?

The fact is that there are no standards for what features email
software should or shouldn't offer. There are also no standards
for what mailing lists should (or shouldn't) do to the Subject
field of an email message.

In Japan, adding a tag for the mailing list, followed by a sequence
number, is quite widespread. Also, it is quite widespread to set
the Reply-To field to the address of the mailing list.

In the US and in Europe, some lists add tags, but usually without
sequence numbers. Also, it's usual to set the Reply-To field to
the original sender. Many people might consider any other
settings as 'strange' or 'bugs'.

ruby-core is a mailing list hosted in Japan, but uses English for
communication, and most of the participants are more used to US/
Europe conventions.

It has been suggested that as a compromize, the tag and sequence
number be appended to the Subject line rather than prepended.
There were no explanations of why this wasn't done. Please
consider it again.

Regards,    Martin.





#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:[e-mail]