[B-Greek] What's with "no subject"?
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Fri May 30 10:38:12 EDT 2003
At 9:13 AM -0500 5/30/03, Eric S. Weiss wrote:
>I just returned from a week on the road, and I see in the B-Greek list
>for May 2003 about 200 messages (just an off-the-cuff guess by me) all
>titled "No subject" and some of them have no author.
>
>What's that all about? Is it my browser that's displaying them that way,
>or was this an oversight on the authors' parts? And, if so, have they
>been asked to include subjects and signatures from now on in their messages?
Eric, I assume that you're seeing these messages marked "no subject" in the
archives rather than in regular list-distributed individual messages. There
are two factors (if not still more!) at work here, neither of which I quite
understand.
(1) our MailMan list-software translates HTML-formatted messages into
plain-text for distribution to members, but I think that it keeps the
HTML-formatted message in the archives (which we list-administrators think
is very unfortunate because they appear with HTML coding rather than in
styled-text formatting in the arachives; when this happens, the
subject-header is often lost, depending upon the mail program used by the
original sender; I note that the same thing happens in digests: I get
digests from corpus-paul and B-Hebrew with "????????" in sender-header and
"no subject" in the subject-header;
(2) for some reason I do not understand, the May 2003 archives on the web
have included numerous dumped messsages from as far back as 1998, many of
them marked as "no subject" in the subject-header.
On the other hand, as I indicated at the outset, I don't think that
messages have been distributed individually to the list without
subject-headers, even if those subject-headers really ought to have been
altered sometimes to reflect a changed subject in the responses.
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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