Re: gmail

["Bryan J. Smith" <b.j.smith@ieee.org>]

I want to admit, yet again, that I'm opinionated at times,
but that should _not_ deter what people choose themselves
(e.g., I'm a huge Libertarian idealist).

When GMail first hit, I played with it and liked what I saw. 
But then I noticed it's tracking was flawed within a matter
of days.  A quick investigation showed that not only was it
tracking on subject (and imperfectly at that), but it was not
maintaining Message-ID.  I have no idea why GMail choose to
break 25+ years of Internet standards, let alone the fact
that tracking on Message-ID would have been far easier to
implement, but they seem to have the same attitude as
Microsoft does on Outlook Express.

E.g., it's rather embarrassing when you run a couple of
mailing lists yourself and people are pointing out that your
own posts are dorking up the archives.

I've evaluated no less than a dozen major web interfaces and
the only web mail that seems to fully honor Message-ID and
support threading is Yahoo Mail.  I know the focus is on the
user experience, but GMail basically gives me what I any web
mail reader can by sorting on subject.  I'm still looking for
a truly threaded mail reader for the web, and I haven't found
one yet.

But until then, Yahoo remains the only major service that
honors all the important headers in its SMTP service.  In
fact, GMail's "breakage" of standards is regularly debated by
many of us "old folk."  Now we might be opinionated, but
there's a good reason for it.

But ultimately, it's your choice.  I'm not here to badger
your choice, just to let people know how it's threading
doesn't work "behind the scenes."  Which is what matters to
me most given the majority of people find my posts in Google
searches and, likewise, I miss many important follow-ups from
GMail users because their posts are not in the
follow-ups/in-response-to links of posts in countless mail
archivers.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith                | Sent from Yahoo Mail
mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org     |  (please excuse any
http://thebs413.blogspot.com/ |   missing headers)

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