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 (amaca...@debian.org)
