Re: [Pan-users] Newbie question about unviewable posts

[Duncan]

Graham Lawrence posted on Thu, 15 Sep 2011 10:17:46 -0700 as excerpted:

> In response to Heinrich Mueller's comment on my previous post
> 
> 
>> Did you notice that there's no References header in this reply?
>> Odd...
> 
> google gives no access to the Subject line when Replying, so in order to
> honor your system's request that its Digest Subject line be be replaced
> by a reference to the original post I made my reply as a new post, using
> a Subject that referred to the original post; (likewise this post).

Ahh... you're doing the list digest.  That explains things!

In that case, you /did/ handle it correctly, rather more so than many 
users, in fact, and the references header (which normally wouldn't be 
displayed, but lists the previous messages in the thread by message-id, 
so a client can thread them properly) would have only referred to the 
digest anyway, so wouldn't have been of much use.

Given HM's developer perspective, I think he was wondering if your 
message not being threaded with the others was a bug, so looked for the 
references header to see how it /should/ have been threaded.  Only there 
wasn't one since it was a new post.  (And as I said, if there had been 
one, it would have been for the digest message anyway, so wouldn't have 
been that much use, since digest readers would have only seen it in the 
next digest, and full list readers wouldn't have had the digest message 
to thread it under.)

But I was wrong in attributing it to a google bug, as became clear once 
we had the missing piece, that being that you read and replied to the 
list digest, not the individual message.

> But
> from your comment it seems that it is combining the new post with the
> old, but sending it with a blank Heading?

No, the subject was perfect.  In fact, it was so perfect that it had HM 
investigating why the other header wasn't there, but we know why, now. 
=:^)

> I do hope that it has delivered these last 2 posts of mine to you in
> text-only format, as requested.

Indeed it has.  Thank you.

(Lest there be any doubt, I wasn't referring to you specifically when I 
replied to HM, mentioning the HTML that gmail users seem to so often 
use... much to their embarrassment, sometimes.  It was a reference to the 
pattern in general.  If you had posted in HTML and I had requested that 
you use plain text previously, by the time I composed that reply I had 
forgotten about it, and was simply referring to the overall pattern, 
since however gmail handles it seems not to "stick" reliably, and gmail 
users often find themselves posting HTML after they had it off... for a 
message or two.  One gmail user once stated that he had to turn it off 
for /every/ message, gmail had no way of telling it that from now on, 
when mail is sent to this address, only use plain text, as many local 
mail clients do.  As I said, I'm not a gmail user personally so I've no 
idea whether that's true or not, but if so, I'd call it a bug, because 
it's all too easy to forget when it has to be done /each/ /time/.  
Whatever.  Just be aware that however you set it, whether it be for each 
mail or always, for a particular destination address, the repeated 
pattern for gmail users seems to be that they may get the plain text 
setting right for a few mails, then for some reason, either because gmail 
forgets if it's set per address, or because the user forgets if it must 
be set for each message, they tend to revert to HTML once again.  It 
doesn't appear to be happening to yours at the moment, but don't be 
surprised if it does, since that's happened often enough to be a noticed 
pattern.)

But I'm glad to be able to say I was wrong about gmail screwing up the 
references header. =:^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman