[ale] OT (slightly): How do you read the ale mailing list?

[Pat Regan]

On Thu, 12 May 2011 09:56:51 -0400
"Lightner, Jeff" <JLightner at water.com> wrote:

> "broken" in your opinion.   Don't get me wrong - I'm not an Outlook
> fan but since it's what the company uses it is what I use here.

It isn't my opinion that Outlook is failing to implement something that
has been a common feature in most other mail clients for decades.  

> Anyway I just checked and saw Outlook does have choices for headers
> and has one called "Conversation" which appears to be their way of
> saying thread.

The "conversation" view is very different than a threaded view.  There
is no indication of which message is a reply to which other message.  

A conversation style view is great when there are only two people
replying back and forth.  It is significantly less useful as the
contributors to a thread grow.

> Personally I've never seen the need for threading tools - I am able to
> ignore threads that don't interest me simply by scanning the list in
> the folder.   Of course I don't have Ale (or most email for that
> matter) go to my inbox - I've set up rules that direct most of my
> email to separate folders.   There's been more than once that I've
> simply marked all the ALE mail as "read" because I didn't have spare
> cycles to read it all.

The biggest advantage of threaded vs conversation views for me is that
threads make it easier to climb back up the list of messages to figure
out how a conversation actually got to a certain point.

Threading is one of those things that you won't know you need until
you've actually used it for a long time.  When someone takes it away
from you you'll scream bloody murder :)

Pat