Re: Diversity in threading, Diversity of MUAs (was Re: How threading works

[Andy Smith <andy () strugglers net>]

Hi,

On Sun, Jan 14, 2024 at 11:10:23AM -0800, William Herrin wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 14, 2024 at 10:21 AM John Levine <johnl () iecc com> wrote:
> > If I were you, I would call up Google and demand that they fix this bug.
>
> What bug? In a decade and a half, Abe's bizarre subject changing
> behavior is the only time GMail has failed to group messages exactly
> as I find convenient. It's doing the right thing. Abe isn't.

Quite a lot of people prefer a proper threaded view as provided by
MUAs that understand In-Reply-To and so on. For those people, Mr
Chen's emails just look a bit strange and annoying (before one even
consumes the content 😀) but are kept part of the same thread tree.

As you note, gmail doesn't work this way and with it being such a
large mailbox provider some of its users have never actually
experience threading done any other way, may not even know that is
an option.

Over on a technical support list there are actually some prolific
old time posters asking for subject changes in sprawling threads
(and citing the list's FAQ…) but also gmail users asking for people
to *not* do that as it spawns new "conversations" for them. There,
the gmail users are at odds with ancient mailing list etiquette as
followed by a dwindling tech priesthood, but the gmailers now form
more than 30% of the active posting user base of the list.

Thanks,
Andy