On Tue, 2011-04-05 at 07:17 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote: > On Tue, 2011-04-05 at 18:15 +1000, Nick Jenkins wrote: > > [...] > > The software also makes is hard to > > do the right thing if you are reading digests (requiring people to start > > a new message, not a reply, and make sure it's in text format not HTML, > > and manually copy the subject header, and manually add a "Re: ", and > > manually copy plus ctrl-shift-v paste the quoted message text above it, > > then crop the message, then manually insert the reply inline below the > > relevant quoted text). That's a 7-step manual process, and if they do > > any of this wrong, we yell at them. And then we're surprised that this > > keeps happening?! > You seem to have missed the point somewhat. All the above steps are a > waste of time, because you're still replying to a digest. No amount of > cutting, pasting and fiddling with formats will make this right unless > you also change the In-Reply-To header,
All true; but honestly I still think the software [and not just Evolution] is at fault. But e-mail is close to ruined at this point except in forums when the 'fascists' haven't given sway [yet]. All e-mail software should thread, by the reply-to chain, always thread, and never allow users to disable threading. Most e-mail users have no-clue what a "thread" even is, don't use threaded views; and who can really blame them? For ages and ages threading in many clients *did not work*, it was rarely if ever the default, and rarely if even mentioned in documentation or training. And now gmail has made the situation even worse. > which is the only thing that > matters to threading. That's why I'm so emphatic: don't reply to > digests, ever. Use the mailer's facility to reply to the digest > component, or if it doesn't have such a function use Gmane or one of the > other news<->mail gateways to reply to the specific message. > Nevertheless, the best solution is simply not to use digests at all > unless your only interest is in reading or archiving the list without > ever wanting to reply to a message. Personally, I can't understand why anyone would even want to *read* digest messages. > > If we want to prevent this from happening, to stop having the same > > ground-hog day discussion yet again, then "the right thing" should be > > easy and it should be the default, and "the wrong thing" should be hard > > and should require malicious deliberate intent. Agree. > There we agree, hence the suggestion in my post. > > We can debate the merits > > of digests and whether they should exist, but the fact is that they DO > > exist in the real world, and the software should deal with them without > > making it easy for users to look bad. True. But do you think an 'enhancement' to grey-out Reply-To when viewing a digest message has a change of being accepted? Isn't there a plugin that already allows correctly replying to a section from a digest? > > 2) If someone replies to a mailing list message, and that message has a > > "List-unsubscribe:" header, and the message subject is "unsubscribe" or > > if the first non-quoted word of message of the body is "unsubscribe", > > how about we pop up a dialog box saying: This is pointless, you cannot catch every way some rube will format / describe their unsubscribe request. Unsubscribe messages are amusingly annoying but they don't pollute the message flow so I'd 'vote' that having developers spend time on them is a waste of time. _______________________________________________ evolution-list mailing list evolution-list@gnome.org To change your list options or unsubscribe, visit ... http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-list
