Re: [Evolution] A Digression on Digests

[Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam whitemice org>]

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.