On Tue, Apr 25, 2023 at 12:39:45AM -0700, dmacdoug wrote: > There are a large number of ways to read messages from the list. I happen > to use Mutt and so I see a list of senders, subject lines, etc. Once I > highlight a certain line and hit enter, I see the message, and 99% of the > time I read a coherent message or question, but occasionally it I might read > something like "i always use stable, Thanks!" and I wonder what that means. > The subject line is now buried among about 8 or 10 header lines at the top > and I need to search through them if, per chance, the real question might be > there.
Yes, this is exactly my experience also. Mutt has a "thread view" screen, and a "message view" screen. The "thread view" screen shows you the sender, date, and Subject (truncated). Once you select the first unread message from the "thread view" screen, you go into the "message view" screen, where you see a selected subset of the headers, and then the body. You might or might not remember the Subject that was shown on the previous screen. You might or might not pay attention to the Subject header among all the other headers that are shown. But then the interesting bit happens once you've read that first message. When you mark it for deletion, you immediately move to the next message. You DON'T go back to the "thread view" screen. You just see the next message, and you can read that and mark it for deletion, and then you see the third message, and so on. While reading this chunk-of-messages, you probably are not reading the Subject headers at all. You only read (or skim) the body, hit "d", read the next one, and so on. Seeing a message whose content is NOT in the body is a disturbance in the workflow, and requires us to exert some effort to try to figure out what just happened. (As well as the quoting stuff, already mentioned.)
