[BioC] possible spam alert
Hi Mark, I'm sending this off-list because I don't want to unnecessarily fill people's inbox if I'm wrong. I think you are misunderstanding Patrick's problem. The point is kind of subtle and requires a bit of knowledge of how e-mail works. What he is complaining about is that people take a random message on the mailing list, hit reply and then change the subject, as opposed to creating a new message. For most people this ends up being the same: a new message appears with a new subject heading. In some cases, which include the archiving system, the e-mail client tries to organize the e-mails by threads. Because some people tend to change the subject name inside of a thread, there is an additional (hidden) identifier that is used. This means that if you replied to a random message, you are now associated to an unrelated thread, which is annoying at best and can cause your message to be ignored at worst. This is especially true in a high-volume list like R-help, as most people don't want to jump all over to follow a conversation and having a completely irrelevant message inside a conversation is confusing. Hopefully this clarifies the situation. You're not being accused of spamming, but of not following one of the finer points of mailing list etiquette. Given the volume of the lists involved and the time and effort that many people spend in reading and replying to the list, I think it is a good idea to make the extra effort to make sure that everything runs smoothly. Francois
On Wed, 2007-01-31 at 17:38 -0500, Kimpel, Mark William wrote:
The last two times I have originated message threads on R or
Bioconductor I have received the message included below from someone
named Patrick Connolly. Both times I was the originator of the message
thread and used what I thought was a unique subject line that explained
as best I could what my question was. Patrick seems to be implying that
I am abusing the R and BioC help newsgroups in this fashion.
When I emailed him to give me a specific example, he did not reply. The
most recent thread that he seems concerned about was to the R list and
was entitled "regexpr and parsing question" . I believe the previous
post of mine that he had problems with was to the BioC list but I can't
remember its subject.
Is this spam?
If I am doing this correctly, you should see the subject "possible spam
alert" in the subject header of THIS message.
Would the moderators of the lists please check and see if I am doing
some wrong and, if not, inform Mr. Connolly that I am not. If others
have received this message in error, it is possible it is spam and users
should be alerted.
Thanks,
Mark
Mark W. Kimpel MD
Official Business Address:
Department of Psychiatry
Indiana University School of Medicine
PR M116
Institute of Psychiatric Research
791 Union Drive
Indianapolis, IN 46202
This is a request to anyone who starts a new subject to begin with a new
message and NOT reply to an existing one. If your mail client is any
good, it's very simple to set up an alias (mine is simply 'r') so that
the tedious task of typing 'r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch' is unnecessary and
it's quicker than scrolling through an address book.
It's also quicker than deleting the previous subject.
Most mornings, I have over a screenful of messages mostly from R-help
and it's very useful to have them threaded. However, the usefulness of
threading is lost when posters reply to a message and then change the
subject instead of creating a new message.
People who don't have a mail client that can display email in threads
are probably unaware that this sort of thing can happen in ones that do:
37 N 25 Jan Luis Silva ( 34) [R] plot/screen
38 N 25 Jan Uwe Ligges ( 55) `->
39 N 25 Jan Fernando Henrique Ferra ( 20) [R] Plotting coloured
histograms
-> 40 N 26 Jan Mohamed A. Kerasha ( 12) |->[R] Distributions.
41 N 26 Jan ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk ( 26) | |->
42 26 Jan Qin Xin ( 9) | `->[R] how could I add
legends
43 27 Jan Ko-Kang Kevin Wang ( 31) | `->
44 N 26 Jan Remigijus Lapinskas ( 32) |->Re: [R] Plotting
coloured his
45 N 26 Jan Damon Wischik (125) `->
46 N 25 Jan Rex_Bryan at urscorp.com ( 10) [R] plotting primatives,
ellipse
47 N 25 Jan Uwe Ligges ( 19) `->
As Martin Maechler explained some time ago, it also screws up the
archives for a similar reason.
Your cooperation will be greatly appreciated.
best