On Wed, Dec 13, 2017 at 06:09:19PM +0000, Curt wrote: > Or maybe the tacit rule is to always recapitulate the subject line in > the body of the post.
I'd go with that one. Many people don't read the subject lines at all, due to years of conditioning on Usenet and mailing lists where the subject line stopped being relevant after the first few responses, if it was ever relevant in the first place. These people just hit "next" and start reading the next message, not looking at the headers at all, and then decide whether to spend more than 1-2 seconds thinking about the message, or just hit "next" again. On the other hand, many people DO read subjects. These people start from the message index, seeing all the subjects only, and delete the messages that don't have an interesting or useful subject, and then possibly cherry pick from the remainder. The subject also helps people who are skimming the mailing list archive, trying to find an answer to their own, similar, question, or trying to find a prior discussion that they vaguely remember. So, you should put your full question with all relevant details in the body, *and* you should have a concise but useful subject.
