[MlMt] note or subject modification

[John Cooper]

John Doherty via mailmate wrote (at 12:27 PM on Sunday, February 5, 2023):

> On Sun 2023-02-05 12:42 PM MST -0700, <mailinglist at freron.com> wrote:
>
>> Yup, I never even noticed before that this option existed and can't really think of why I would want to do it. But different strokes, etc. Maybe someone has a reason that I haven't thought of.
>>
>> I believe the typical use case is something like this: Whenever receiving an email with a non-descriptive subject header such as “Help” or “Bug” (it happens a lot) then the recipient might want to rewrite the subject to something which makes it easier to identify later on.
>
> Having now thought a little more, I have one long-term and pretty regular correspondent who nearly always uses terrible subjects (e.g., "question") and has other sort of horrible email habits, like responding to existing threads with new messages with new subjects.
>
> I might try this feature after all but would have to experiment some. I wonder how things would work out if the chain of messages goes like this, where B is me:
>
> A: Subject: question
> B: change subject to something helpful, reply
> A: replies, does not change subject
> B: replies, does not change subject
> A: "replies" but really sends a new message with some other unhelpful subject
> B: change subject back to same as second message, reply
> A: replies, does not change subject
>
> And so on. Might be more trouble than it's worth, but this is a correspondent whose messages I sometimes want to find and refer to much later, like months or more. That's when the bad email habits are even worse than in the moment. Stuff can be pretty hard to find.

Seems like for many people, applying a descriptive tag to the discussion might be easier than force-applying a change of subject line to an extended thread.

I miss Eudora's powerful abilities too, but as Benny mentioned, they become more difficult both to implement and to use an an IMAP world.