On Sun, May 25, 2014 at 05:40:10PM -0500, Chris Muller wrote:
> 
> On Sun, May 25, 2014 at 3:04 PM, Craig Latta <craig at netjam.org> wrote:
> >
> > Hoi David--
> >
> >      Cool! But please use a new thread when starting a new thread on the
> > mailing list? I kill threads when I'm no longer interested in them, and
> > don't want to miss out on stuff which is actually new.
> >
> 
> Hi Craig, you've mentioned this a few times, and sometimes I wondered
> if I was doing it right.  Could you please confirm?
> 
> You're asking if one is replying to a email, but changing the
> subject-matter of that conversation, then please change the
> Subject-line of the email.  And, optionally(?), put the old subject
> line inside parentheses prefiexed by "was:").
> 
> The purpose of this convention is to let emails be well-formed; their
> subjects matching the bodies and not wandering into other subjects.
> This would be helpful for searching email later too..
>

Hi Chris,

In this case, I think that caused a problem for a different reason. Out of
convenience (and this is something I will not do again), I sometimes start
a new mail message by "replying" to an old one, then changing to my new
subject line. I had assumed (without ever bothering to check) that mail threading
is done based on subject line, and had not noticed that the mail headers
contain the "In-Reply-To:" information that no doubt is used for connecting
the mail threads.

So in the future I will not use "reply to" unless actually replying to something.

Dave