What's in a subject line?

I see a lot of posts on certain lists for which the subject line is:
"Re: digest 30" or something like that. This seems almost meaningless
to me - why not reference the subject line of the particular POST in the
digest that one is responding to?

JdL

> "Re: digest 30" ... seems almost meaningless
> to me - why not reference the subject line of the particular POST in
the
> digest that one is responding to?

Hey John,

Thanks for bringing up a pet peeve of mine.

I agree with you on this.

I think some people worry about stuff being properly sorted according
to thread but I believe that yahoo can handle changed subject lines --
there are also message Ids in the header that keep things together
even when the subject is changed.

Of course digest messages are not threadable anyway, but aside from
that, I notice that I miss out on some good threads about peanut
butter because the subject says "Umbrellas" ever though they have long
left that subject and are now talking about peanut butter. (And since
I am not interested in umbrellas I don't even look at those messages.)

What I am saying is that it would be helpful if people always tried to
put a description of the actual topic, or maybe even keywords in the
subject line, rather than dragging along some long dead subject line
like a piece of toilet paper stuck to ones sh

John,

--- In metatuning@y..., "John A. deLaubenfels" <jdl@a...> wrote:
> I see a lot of posts on certain lists for which the subject line is:
> "Re: digest 30" or something like that.

I actually dropped a note to Robert Walker, who had been doing this a
bit lately. If you get the digest, it is sometimes easy to forget
when you do a reply that it will turn out that way. He says he'll try
and remember to fix it in the future.

Another thing that is a little more difficult to deal with is "thread
drift"... which I'll make a new post, the reason being clear.

Jon

Hi John,

> I see a lot of posts on certain lists for which the subject line is:
> "Re: digest 30" or something like that. This seems almost meaningless
> to me - why not reference the subject line of the particular POST in the
> digest that one is responding to?

A fair number of these posts are from me, so sorry about that.

Reason is that I get digests, and to reply to the digest is a quick
way to get the right address into the to field. Or if I see a message on the
web site, still reply to one of the digests rather than use the web
site form. Two reasons for that - means the message
goes into the sent folder, which I find useful, and also,
if you accidentally press the back button or click on a link
or for whatever reason lose the page in the html browser in middle
of typing the post, you lose your message. That happens to me
rather often.

If you do it in the e-mail program, you can save at the end of
each para., and it doesn't disappear in normal circumstances anyway.

However, means that one needs to remember to paste the subject
line from the post or web site into the e-mail. I often
forget to do that. But only recently realised how often
that happens.

I'll try to remember now. Sorry about it. I also find it confusing
when looking at web page, or digests, or archive, if messages
have digest numbers in the subject line.

Robert