I'm sorry to bring up such petty issues, but this has been nagging me for quite a long while now... The Haskell mailing lists have one rather unflattering characteristic: their mail threads are almost always broken. I'll elaborate. Most mail user agents arrange messages in threads, keeping track of which message is a reply to which. The programs use the In-Reply-To: and References: -headers of the messages for this. By some coincidence, the various Haskell mailing lists have an uncommonly high proportion of replies which do not have these headers. As a result, many followup messages show up as a new thread in the unlucky reader's mail program, and this makes following a discussion more inconvenient. This also affects web archives of the mailing lists. The reason for these lacking headers is most likely faulty mail programs. Since programs are at fault here, not people, I won't mention names, but will simply identify the most common broken user agents. X-Mailer: Claris Emailer 2.0v3, January 22, 1998 (No threading information of any kind) X-Mimeole: Produced By Microsoft Exchange V6.0.6249.0 (Does have some very non-standard Thread-Topic: and Thread-Index: -headers, but no In-Reply-To: or References:) User-Agent: slrn/0.9.7.4 (Linux) (Apparently via a mail-news -gateway. Replies do have a References: -header, but with locally generated message-ids instead of the real ones.) There are also other messages with threading problems, but these are by far the most common sources. If you find yourself using one of these programs, could you please check your configuration or maybe consider switching to a more well-behaving user agent? This would make your messages much easier to follow. Thanks. Lauri Alanko la@iki.fi
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I'm sorry to bring up such petty issues, but this has been nagging me for quite a long while now...
The Haskell mailing lists have one rather unflattering characteristic: their mail threads are almost always broken. [... snip ...] X-Mimeole: Produced By Microsoft Exchange V6.0.6249.0 (Does have some very non-standard Thread-Topic: and Thread-Index: -headers, but no In-Reply-To: or References:)
Exchange removes In-Reply-To: headers from messages (either that or Outlook doesn't generate them when it talks to an Exchange server). Fortunately we also have an SMTP server here, and it's possible to coax Outlook into using that instead of Exchange for sending mail. Let's see if this works... Cheers, Simon
On Wed, Aug 21, 2002 at 01:22:26PM +0100, Simon Marlow wrote:
Exchange removes In-Reply-To: headers from messages (either that or Outlook doesn't generate them when it talks to an Exchange server).
Apparently it removes some other (less important) headers as well, such as X-Mailer.
Fortunately we also have an SMTP server here, and it's possible to coax Outlook into using that instead of Exchange for sending mail. Let's see if this works...
It works great. Thanks a lot. Lauri Alanko la@iki.fi
participants (2)
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Lauri Alanko -
Simon Marlow