Re: Please use an indicative subject line

[Carl Distefano cld@xxxxxxxx]

Reply to note from "Patricia M. Godfrey"  Sat,
24 Jun 2006 12:07:49 -0400

Patricia:

>> Yes, threads are important. But you can change the Subject
>> line at will and remain "in thread", because all that matters
>> is that you specifically "Reply To" a preceding message. Every
>> Emailer encodes the msg ID[s] of the message[s] to which it is
>> "Replying", and these are sent as part of the reply's "header"
>> (take a look sometime).
>
> I suspected that. Is there any way one can re-create that by
> brute force later? I sometimes copy a post to my Xy log (one
> file for each month), delete the post from my e-mail app, and
> then think of something I want to say. I copy and paste the
> subject line and snippets of the previous post into the reply,
> but I don't see any way to get the Message ID (which I've been
> saving) into the reply.

That's not a problem, Patricia. I believe (correct me, Robert, if
I'm wrong) that the Message-ID only becomes important if you
*change* the Subject line. If you keep the Subject as is, XySearch
adds your message to the existing thread without further ado. My
e-mail programs (Hacksaw, Febooti) -- command-line tools that allow
me to compose and send mail from within XyWrite -- don't encode the
Message-ID when I reply to a message (probably aren't capable, in
the technical sense, of "replying" at all), and XySearch threads my
posts correctly -- if I don't tinker with the Subject line. (I'm
not sure what happens if I do change the Subject, and now I'm
curious. As a test, I'm going to send this message a second time,
with different Subject header. We'll see.)

--
Carl Distefano
cld@xxxxxxxx