On Thu, 8 Jun 2000, Michael Orton wrote:
MO>I was entirely unaware that changing the subject line had any import
MO>whatsoever.
It does to some peoples' mailreaders, and to the brand-spanking-new web
forum (see below). At least, for varying values of "import."
MO>I was trying to reply to the subtopic which I thought was of
MO>import and becasue the post from Phoenyx does not come from the subtopic
MO>when I hit reply it was not included in the "To:".
Outlook Express, right?
It reeeeeally should respect the "Reply-to" line, which is the one that
includes the subtopic. Forget Apple, *Microsoft* is the company that's
bound and determined to "think different[ly]."
I'll poke around with it on my machine, and see if there's a configuration
that will let it reply properly. If not, I'll take a survey and see if
anyone's using the To: line (which is, currently, always consistent no
matter what subtopics are in use) to sort by. If no one is, I can make
the To line reflect the subtopics too. (It's much easier than getting
Microsoft to change *their* software, anyway, even if they're technically
wrong.)
MO>If you need to bring back subtopics I'm coing to have difficulty maintaining
MO>the subject line becasue I cannot "reply to author" with them in the current
MO>implementation.
If you're not averse to changing software, I *highly* recommend Pegasus
(http://www.pmail.com/). It's free, does beautiful filtering and
organizing when it's set up right, and even handles the special
mailing-list functions embedded in the header of every Phoenyx message.
And, like the Phoenyx, it's named after a mythical creature, so it's *got*
to be good.
Real Soon Now, we'll have a tutorial up on the Phoenyx web pages about how
to set up Pegasus (and eventually, every common mail reader (yes, even
Outlook) that we can get someone to write about... volunteers welcome) for
best operation with the Phoenyx.
MO>It was not my intention to trash your threading - I will see what can be
MO>done...
The web forum (http://www.phoenyx.net/forums/ if you want to take a
peek... it's open to the public now, although there's a lot of work to be
done on it to make it Really Cool) is a fairly new thing, and some of what
makes *it* happy isn't intuitively obvious when you're trying to make a
mailing list happy.
Making *everybody* happy at the same time is a challenge, to say the
least. But as the threading gets smarter (e.g. able to use
References/InReplyTo/etc and maybe even quoted text itself, as well as the
subject lines, to figure threads out), it will require less special care
on the user end. It's no good having all these advanced bells and
whistles if they just make posting a simple message harder.
I'll get off my soapbox now. Anybody who's actually interested in the
inner workings of the Firehawk software, and in helping us improve same
(whether by just making suggestions from the user perspective, or by
writing things like the email how-to) is welcome to subscribe over at
http://www.wirebird.com/fh_users/ or just send your ideas to
support@phoenyx.net.
(We now return you to the game I have so wordily interrupted...)
--
Karen J. Cravens silver@phoenyx.net
