[tlug] But why so excessively?! [Was "the philosophy of Subj."]

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Roger Markus writes:

 > Following the letter of the convention while ignoring the spirit of
 > it.  Maybe he's a lawyer or something?

*sigh*  Please read the RFCs before spouting such nonsense.

Specifically, the Subject field is property of the author, period.
That *is* the spirit of the RFCs.  There are no universally accepted
conventions concerning the Subject field, although here on TLUG we try
to practice *noblesse oblige*, in the awareness that some otherwise
reasonable people get rather attached to their MUAs-That-Really-Suck.

By definition, the Subject field has nothing to do with threading.  In
practice, it is consulted because of the Postel Principle -- the
intersection of "dumb" and "popular" in the MUA field is way too
large.  However, true threading is done using the References field
(preferred), or the In-Reply-To field (if necessary), which you ...

 > PS - Just to get in the spirit of things, I'll change the Subject of
 > this message too - ala Jim's method.

... evidently don't understand.  You broke the the thread here by
omitting both of the relevant headers; Jim does not break threads.

http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html is an excellent resource
concerning the technology of threading.