Subject headers in list mail

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Tue Nov 12 07:21:57 EST 2002


Dear B-Greekers:

Subject-headers in list mail don't usually present a problem; nevertheless
they are very important for conducting serious searches of the archives,
and the archives will show whatever headers people have put or left on
their responses by default from messages to which they are responding.
Could I make a couple suggestions that are really fairly obvious if one is
only a little bit thoughtful; a little care taken in this matter will
hopefully obviate difficulties experienced by searchers of the archives as
well as readers of new mail.

(1) Try to make your headers as precisely focused as possible upon the
subject of discussion or inquiry. If focus is upon a Biblical text, it
certainly is reasonable to indicate that within the header; if it's upon a
grammatical item, indicate it. Above all avoid subject-headers that are not
indicative of anything or certainly not of the focus of your message, such
as "I'll try" or "Another goof by ..."

(2) When responding to a message that you've read in a digest, please
REPLACE the subject-header "B-Greek Digest # ..." with the original
subject-header from the particular message to which you're responding.

(3) If you're "piggy-backing" on an existing thread to raise a tangential
issue, change the subject-header, adding, if you think it helpful, a tag
like "(was 'xxx')." If you're piggy-backing on a previous message to ask a
wholly unrelated issue (a not-uncommon device to avoid the effort of using
the list's e-address), please give your message a new header.

Thanks.
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Co-Chair, B-Greek List
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu OR cwconrad at ioa.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/



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