mailinglist

Each tool and platform has its own rules and system and while you can pull (almost) everything to a page with the RSS feature, the format is not the same. Compare:

|| **RSS Feed** || E-mail is a threaded medium, like a forum, and even a comparatively unsophisticated mail client like the Outlook Express can be used to display the contents of the inbox in thread view <[]>.
 * **Threaded list**
 * Take the Yahoo Group message feature. While online the messages usually appear unthreaded (unless you group them by topic), they become so in the digest.**
 * [[image:threads2.jpg width="528" height="252"]] || [[image:thread1.jpg width="306" height="252"]] ||

E-mail threading is a great feature because it allows participants in mailing lists to focus on one topic at a time, and it allows people to revisit earlier discussions easily, without having to piece individual messages together from unrelated threads. However, for this to work, it is important NOT to hijack threads. Just DON'T hijack threads <[]>.

I follow the Yahoo Group Multilit as a digest mail ( I use RSS feeds to aggregate content from other platforms which do not follow this system), so I pay attention to the different topics that come up and the answers that follow. Notice how the “Greetings from São Paulo” thread has been hijacked. None of these messages made a contribution to that topic. The most important rule is the **one-topic-per-message** rule. If if there are two two things you want to talk about, send two separate messages to the list. This is because decent e-mail clients keep track of message threads, which is very convenient if you want to follow any particular discussion on a list. The list archives are also supposed to be viewable by thread, so don't break the threading. Start from a blank message when you start a new topic. Hit the Reply button on the old message if you reply to an old message.
 * Vance's answer does not follow mine or Nina's || and from then onwards, others answer back to Vance on different topics but still using the same subject line, even though some effort is made to change as the mails follow. ||
 * [[image:thread1.jpg width="455" height="362"]] || [[image:threads.jpg width="498" height="316"]] ||

Also make sure you delete the old message from your reply. People will go through the archives in the future, and old messages inside of new messages make for very tedious reading (Plus sending the same stuff back and forth repeatedly wastes both bandwidth and storing space.)

So, in a nutshell: if you have a contribution to an ongoing discussion, please make sure you start from an existing message in the relevant thread and hit the Reply button (please also trim the bulk of old message from your new message because it's irritating when the same messages keep traveling back and forth multiple times -- hanging on to short quoted snippets may, however, help you contextualise your reply, so that it's immediately obvious what exactly you respond to).

If, by contrast, you want to raise a new topic, please start from a blank page and identify the topic in your subject line.

These are widely observed rules that allow people to hang on to their sanity.