On Fri, Apr 04, 2025 at 10:22:47AM +0700, Max Nikulin wrote:
On 02/04/2025 05:17, Jeffrey Walton wrote:
I see the changing of title or subject to add things like "SOLVED" is
not included in the FAQ.
I am neutral to this recommendations. Just some considerations...
I rarely use Gmail web UI, but this time I was curious enough to check its behavior.
Max,
Thank you very much for experimenting and actually providing some hard data.
I would not recommend editing subject in Gmail web UI to add "solved". Sometimes In-Reply-To and References headers are lost. So there is no guarantee that the thread will not be broken. (Perhaps closing compose popup and resuming the draft later affects behavior. General impression is that it is rather fragile.)
OK, understood.
When reading mail, minor subject changes like "solved" are hidden within a conversation. Subject is rendered once above messages. So efforts to mark a message may not be noticed.
Again when reading mail, if subject is changed almost completely: "Old" to "New (was: Old)" to "New" with "(was: ...)" stripped by e.g. Thunderbird or Emacs; then the thread is split into 3 conversations, threading headers are not respected.
Bother - is that the fault of the MUA?
"Solved" is never removed from subject, making it close to useless if the message caused continuation of discussion. In this sense messengers and web forums with their likes and thanks may be better to mark useful messages in long threads.
This is the real problem: threads here go on for months and years.
Let's avoid discussions if gmail should be used. De-facto it is widely used, it has features and limitations. My point is that gmail users should be
aware that some suggestions perfectly valid for other MUA should be avoided in the mail.google.com web application.
OK - So the monthly FAQ here says to change subjects / create a summary.
I think this probably came from reading the Debian Community Guidelines originally from Enrico Zini at
https://people.debian.org/~enrico/dcg/
It does not currently explicitly say "use SOLVED"
The Debian mailing list Code of Conduct does say to wrap at 80 characters
but says nothing about subject changes.
It *does* say to use common sense.
I'll take out the recommendation to change subjects as it stands and add a
note that changing subject can break certain mail user agents.
Instead, I will suggest that a new mail should be composed with a
meaningful subject line.
(As a side note: The web interface does benefit from [SOLVED] as being visible. I just found an example accidentally by looking at April 2024 rather than at April 2025 - but the good effect was ruined as the thread then continued for far too long.)
I hope this is satisfactory to all concerned: if it isn't, please reply
in a new mail with a meaningful subject.
With every good wish, as ever,
Andy Cater
(
[email protected])
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