[Tutor] The Charms of Gmail

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, Dec 22, 2013 at 07:06:24PM -0500, Keith Winston wrote:
> The way I was doing this before, I had to retype the subject line, and I
> think that broke threading. Hopefully it will be fixed now that I ditched
> digests.

Nah, threading is already broken in a digest. Every "normal" post is 
either a reply to a previous post, in which case it continues the thread 
from that previous post, or the start of a brand new thread. But digests 
are special: they include many different posts. So the digest itself 
cannot be part of all of those independent threads. It has to be treated 
as a new post, and hence the start of a new thread. But not everyone 
gets digests, and they aren't archived. So when you reply to the digest, 
your reply shows up as a reply to a thread which doesn't exist anywhere.

Editing the subject line will not break threading. Or at least it 
shouldn't -- there may be some feeble email programs which don't know 
how to thread correctly when you change the subject line.


> I don't know what you mean, nik, about (including layer 8!)? [research]
> Never mind, I get it. But I can't get layer 8 buy-in, too many disparate
> interests & inattentive participants (me, myself, AND I, after all).

I have no idea what "layer 8" means either. Googling finds this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layer_8


-- 
Steven