Re: mea máxima culpa

[David Kastrup]

Carl Peterson <address@hidden> writes:

> On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 2:04 PM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>>
>> I'm certain Gmail will also be able to figure out the mail you are
>> replying to without referring to any header at all as long as any Gmail
>> user has not yet deleted it (and probably even afterwards).  But for a
>> normal mail server/client setup not relying on a universal freely
>> associating data kraken on the server end, one needs to have information
>> as specific as a Message Id in order to do reliable queries.
>
>
> My understanding is that Gmail does not cross reference messages from
> multiple accounts to figure out threading.

I was being facetious here.  I'm certain they don't want to point out
the full amount of referencing/indexing/correlation they are doing.  But
they are not getting billions of advertising dollars for nothing.

> I'll also issue a mea culpa of my own. When you mentioned threading, I
> was not thinking in the sense of a tree. I was only considering the
> idea of a "conversation," understanding which messages belong
> together. To my knowledge, Gmail does not attempt to figure out who is
> replying to whom, but uses a chronological sequencing.

Not sure about that.  The information usually is available in the
headers, and as far as I can tell, Gmail does preserve and maintain it
as well.  So unless someone "breaks the chain", it would seem like a
poor choice not to actually use it.

>> Don't use "Reply to sender" if you don't want to reply to the sender.
>
>
> (1) 99% of the time, if I'm replying to a message, I'm intending to
> reply to the list. Defaults are usually selected to in some way
> minimize effort, which brings me to (2), I'm lazy. Reply all requires
> extra mouse-clicks.

Poor choice of user interface then.

>> > As a matter of consistency, I think both the individual messages
>> > and the digest should reply to the list, or neither.
>>
>> Do you mean to imply that the digest _does_ add an explicit Reply-To:
>> header and it goes to the list?  That would indeed be on the less
>> than sane side.
>
> I have no idea what the digest does or doesn't do. I am replying to
> your prior statement, "Maybe the reply-to header of the digest should
> not even point to the list?" As Tim pointed out, the non-digest
> messages do not and your proposal would be logically consistent with
> that.

Not really.  I was suggesting _adding_ a Reply-To header, but one that
does not go back to the list.

> I am simply stating a preference for the reply-to of both to do so.

As I said, replies from a digest rarely make sense because of breaking
the message threading.

-- 
David Kastrup