[SLUG] Mailing Lists!

[Mark Feather]

Hi Gav,

Thanks for your excellent response to my last email, but my problem is with
each individual posting where people add comments, replies all over the
place within each posting.  Some at the top, others at the bottom.  Others
add replies wherever it best suites and some people cut and paste there
relevant interesting bits then add replies, all are OK in a one to one
situation but when several people are involved all with there own ideas on
how to reply (myself included) you can very quickly loose your way through
the posting not knowing where to start or finish.  Do i start to read the
email from the top, the bottom or somewhere in-between.

Often the Content of the emails is beyond me anyway and when you have no
idea where to start reading from i often find the delete key useful which is
a shame.

Mail from mailing lists are a very small part of my daily mail, in fact the
SLUG mailings are my only mail from a mailing list at the mo and therefore i
find no reason or advantage to change my mailing client.  Outlook Express
works for me at the mo, i don't keep mails for long and copy and paste
anything of interest into text files for safe keeping so i don't see any
reason to change.

Hi Mark,

On Sat, 2003-08-23 at 13:47, Mark Feather wrote:
> Now you know why  i hate Mailing lists, you never know where you are, top,
> bottom, middle, who's who, when why and how.  What's it all about, who
> started first, who was last........Fcuk it now i'm lost!

All modern clients I know of (except the current version of OSX "Mail")
show mail in it's natural threaded format, ie.

initial post
           |- mail 1
           |- mail 2
           |- mail 3
                   |- mail 4
                   |- mail 5

where mails 1,2 and 3 are replies to the initial post and mails 4 and 5
are replies to mail 3 etc. This is a logical and ordered way to
represent a group discussion. It mirrors the way conversations take
place. It's easily navigable. It's easy to see who is replying to who's
mail. It's easy to point someone to a previous discussion on a subject,
you can just point them to the single thread rather than to lots of
separate mails. It solves all the things you pointed out above as to why
you hate mailing lists.

> Where do you add your bit and when you do contribute you get a kicked in
the
> teeth and your head caved in!
>
> They are CRAP!
>
> Siht! i've broken the thread again!

There aren't any rules about how to post but there are unwritten best
practises that have evolved since the beginning of this email thing
started, but threads keep things neat and tidy, especially in a
discussion that consist of more than a few emails.

Perhaps it's time to ditch Outlook Express and try a different mail
client :)

Both mozilla-mail and opera run on Windows and handle mail/mailing lists
perfectly.

Gav

--
Gavin Baker <gav at supercowpowers.org>