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Sunday, 05/19/02

A few weeks ago I fell passionately in love with the gorgeous thread map in mutt, a command line email client. (Nicholas has a screenshot.) Mutt's thread map has sliced bread beaten coming and going, as I have lots of tools around the house that can slice bread, but very few that can competently thread email.

I read dozens to hundreds of email messages a day in mutt. The thread map does wonderful things for my ability to put up with list traffic, because keeping topics and subtopics grouped together means I stay focused on a single thing longer. I can also choose to stop reading an entire topic at one go without having to constantly revisit the decision as I run across more related messages.

There's a side effect. On every mailing list, often several times a day, somebody starts a new thread by replying to a recent message, changing the Subject, and writing about something unrelated, all as a shortcut to re-entering the list address. These gyrations aside, the headers in the new message declare exactly the message to which they replied, and a good thread map sorts their message as if it were a reply.

On most technical lists, even those aimed at beginners, there's a pretty strong ethic to refrain from asking questions that will be perceived as under-researched, or like the poster might be trying to find someone to complete a homework assignment. The overwhelming majority of these replies-that-are-not-replies pose questions and ask for help. There's often a good deal of preening to get a question noticed, and yet the questioners are oblivious to having just announced the fact that they were too lazy to use copy and paste. 12:46AM «


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