[OS X TeX] "Hijacking" a thread

[BenBehr]

Thanks Menzel,
I was just as clueless as you where. Thanks for the info.
Ben

On 04.11.2008, at 08:04, Christopher Menzel wrote:

> Joseph C. Slater wrote:
>> Seriously. Stop using this thread. Start a new one. Sent an email  
>> to macosx-tex at email.esm.psu.edu to start one. I'll even start it  
>> for you.
>
> Well, maybe I'm more clueless than most, but I didn't have even an  
> inkling that Joseph Slater's curt message was targeting me until he  
> made an example of me (and also falsely accused me of top-posting --  
> the ignominy!).  On the off chance that others might be equally  
> clueless, and as penance for my transgressions, let me use my breach  
> of netiquette as a "teaching moment" instead of a mere object of  
> scorn: To "hijack" a thread is to start what you *think* is a new  
> thread by *replying* to a message in an existing thread and changing  
> the Subject header instead of beginning a new message that you  
> explicitly address to the list yourself.  You might think (as I did)  
> that these are two paths to the same end, but the problem is that,  
> when you reply to a message in an existing thread, an identifier is  
> preserved in your message (in the usually hidden "In-Reply-To"  
> header) that points to the replied-to message, and this identifier  
> is used by mail clients capable of subject threading (as most are)  
> to reconstruct threads.  Hence, if you try to start a new thread by  
> replying to a message in an existing thread, even if you supply a  
> new Subject header, you succeed only in super-gluing your completely  
> irrelevant message, and all followups to that message, to the  
> existing thread -- the thread has been hijacked.  Note this also  
> affects the list archives, as the In-Reply-To headers are used to  
> construct threads for the archives as well.
>
> I hope that's helpful to some folks.
>
> Chris Menzel
>
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