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possible spam alert

3 messages · Mark Kimpel, Duncan Murdoch, Francois Pepin

Original
Mark Kimpel
# 
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
Duncan Murdoch
#
On 1/31/2007 5:38 PM, Kimpel, Mark William wrote:
Your last message (subject "[R] regexpr and parsing question") shows up 
in my reader as a reply to a message by Gabor Grothendieck with subject 
"Re: [R] change plotting symbol for groups in trellis graph", because it 
has this line in the header:

In-Reply-To: <971536df0701301355j77b8d05oabce276b61fa2bf7 at mail.gmail.com>

and his message had this in the header:

Message-ID: <971536df0701301355j77b8d05oabce276b61fa2bf7 at mail.gmail.com>

That's what Patrick was complaining about.  You probably found Gabor's 
message in the group, hit "Reply", and then edited the subject line to 
make it unique.  Your mailer remembered that it was a reply to Gabor's 
message, and told everyone that, even though it wasn't really.

Instead, if you want to write to R-help, just start a new message, and 
send it to r-help at r-project.org (or r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch).

Duncan Murdoch
Francois Pepin
# 
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: