[R] E-Mail/Post Threading (was: Bonferroni p-value greater t

(Ted Harding) ted.harding at nessie.mcc.ac.uk
Thu Mar 29 20:38:05 CEST 2007


On 29-Mar-07 17:15:27, Marc Schwartz wrote:
> [...]
> Just a quick heads up here, that deleting the body text of
> a message or changing the subject line, does not alter the
> 'linkage' between posts.
> 
> There are standards for how messages are 'threaded' and largely
> have to do with the e-mail headers, not the e-mail content.
> 
> A couple of quick references that might be helpful:
> 
> http://people.dsv.su.se/~jpalme/ietf/message-threading.html
> 
> http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html

This above, of course, is a good reason for not replying to an
existing message when you want to start a completely new thread.

However, I'm wondering what is the best way to start a new thread
which legitimately branches out from an existing one.

For example, someone posts a message which discusses at length a
method of isotonic binary regression, and in the middle of this
describes a curious approach to obtaining confidence bands for
the regression. I'm intrigued by the confidence band issue, get
some ideas about it, and want to start a new thread to develop
just this aspect.

However, to do so I want in the first place to include several
quotations from the original message. This, of course, is most
easily done by replying to that message -- so that it gets included
in the reply -- and editing this included message, and changing
the subject.

But that stays in the old thread, which I don't want. Now of course
one can copy over the old text into a brand new blank message,
and edit it up into a simulacrum of a "reply" -- all the usual
"On NN March 2007, XXX wrote:" ... as well as the "> " inclusion
markers, etc.. But that could be tedious. Nevertheless, perhaps
it is the right thing to do -- unless there's a work-round using
the "reply" mechanism?

Best wishes to all,
Ted.

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Date: 29-Mar-07                                       Time: 19:37:54
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