{"id":12,"date":"2009-06-09T19:54:39","date_gmt":"2009-06-10T03:54:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.strcpy.org\/?p=12"},"modified":"2009-06-09T19:54:39","modified_gmt":"2009-06-10T03:54:39","slug":"email-thread-replies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.strcpy.org\/?p=12","title":{"rendered":"Email thread replies"},"content":{"rendered":"

A pet peeve of mine: many people do not realize that the email you are replying to is in the email header. (Specifically the “In-Reply-To” and “References” headers)<\/p>\n

This feature makes it much easier to thread emails. It is easy for a mail client to tell that message X is in reply to message Y. It also has the side benefit that you can change the subject of a conversation without breaking the thread, if the subject of the conversation changes.<\/p>\n

With that said, often people construct a new (non reply) email to a mailing list by<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Reply to an email sent to the list<\/li>\n
  2. Clear the subject and contents of the email, and any recipients other than the list itself<\/li>\n
  3. Set a new subject<\/li>\n
  4. Write the email<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    When you do this, your email shows up as a reply to the original email! This is bad — your email might be missed as a reply to an older thread, and you leak information. It clutters up the thread information; neither you nor I want your email nested among the old thread. It makes it harder to read old threads. As such, I go through and manually fix the problem in my mailbox — which means that you’re making me do extra work!<\/p>\n

    The<\/span> A correct way to send a new non-reply email to a list<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Create a new message (not a reply)<\/li>\n
    2. Set the To: field to the mailing list address<\/li>\n
    3. Set the subject to whatever<\/li>\n
    4. Write the email<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      You can, of course, start with a reply and strip out the relevant headers, if your mail client lets you do that easily.<\/p>\n

      Note that the converse is also true — it is not<\/strong> correct to construct a reply by creating a new message and copying in the contents of the old one. However, the most common cause of missing reply headers is broken email clients rather than misinformed users.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      A pet peeve of mine: many people do not realize that the email you are replying to is in the email header. (Specifically the “In-Reply-To” and “References” headers) This feature makes it much easier to thread emails. It is easy for a mail client to tell that message X is in reply to message Y. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.strcpy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.strcpy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.strcpy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.strcpy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.strcpy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.strcpy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14,"href":"http:\/\/www.strcpy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions\/14"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.strcpy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.strcpy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.strcpy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}