Peter, Thanks you for your explanation, I had taken Mr. Connolly's message to me to imply that I was not changing the subject line. I use MS Outlook 2007 and, unless I am just not seeing it, Outlook does not normally display the "in reply to" header, I was under the mistaken impression that that was what the Subject line was for. See, for example, the header to your message to me below. Outlook will, however, sort messages by Subject, and that is what I thought was meant by threading. Well, I learned something today and apologize for any inconvenience my posts may have caused. BTW, I use Outlook because it is supported by my university server and will synch my appointments and contacts with my PDA, which runs Windows CE. If anyone has a suggestion for me of a better email program that will provide proper threading AND work with a MS email server and synch with Windows CE, I'd love to hear it. Thanks again, Mark Mark W. Kimpel MD (317) 490-5129 Work, & Mobile (317) 663-0513 Home (no voice mail please) 1-(317)-536-2730 FAX -----Original Message----- From: Peter Dalgaard [mailto:p.dalgaard@biostat.ku.dk] Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2007 6:25 PM To: Kimpel, Mark William Cc: bioconductor at stat.math.ethz.ch; r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch Subject: Re: [R] possible spam alert Kimpel, Mark William wrote: > The last two times I have originated message threads on R or > Bioconductor I have received the message included below from someone > named Patrick Connolly. Both times I was the originator of the message > thread and used what I thought was a unique subject line that explained > as best I could what my question was. Patrick seems to be implying that > I am abusing the R and BioC help newsgroups in this fashion. > > When I emailed him to give me a specific example, he did not reply. The > most recent thread that he seems concerned about was to the R list and > was entitled "regexpr and parsing question" . I believe the previous > post of mine that he had problems with was to the BioC list but I can't > remember its subject. > > Is this spam? > No. Breach of netiquette, yes. The message in question starts a new thread, yet contains an In-Reply-To: header line, which presumably means that you started writing the message as a reply to something completely unrelated, specifically: "Re: [R] change plotting symbol for groups in trellis graph". You should not do that, unless you know how to remove the In-Reply-To line (and this is not obvious in many mail clients); changing the subject is not sufficient. > If I am doing this correctly, you should see the subject "possible spam > alert" in the subject header of THIS message. > > Would the moderators of the lists please check and see if I am doing > some wrong and, if not, inform Mr. Connolly that I am not. If others > have received this message in error, it is possible it is spam and users > should be alerted. > > Thanks, > > Mark > > Mark W. Kimpel MD > > > > > > Official Business Address: > > > > Department of Psychiatry > > Indiana University School of Medicine > > PR M116 > > Institute of Psychiatric Research > > 791 Union Drive > > Indianapolis, IN 46202 > > > This is a request to anyone who starts a new subject to begin with a new > message and NOT reply to an existing one. If your mail client is any > good, it's very simple to set up an alias (mine is simply 'r') so that > the tedious task of typing 'r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch' is unnecessary and > it's quicker than scrolling through an address book. > It's also quicker than deleting the previous subject. > > Most mornings, I have over a screenful of messages mostly from R-help > and it's very useful to have them threaded. However, the usefulness of > threading is lost when posters reply to a message and then change the > subject instead of creating a new message. > > People who don't have a mail client that can display email in threads > are probably unaware that this sort of thing can happen in ones that do: > > > 37 N 25 Jan Luis Silva ( 34) [R] plot/screen > 38 N 25 Jan Uwe Ligges ( 55) `-> > 39 N 25 Jan Fernando Henrique Ferra ( 20) [R] Plotting coloured > histograms > -> 40 N 26 Jan Mohamed A. Kerasha ( 12) |->[R] Distributions. > 41 N 26 Jan ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk ( 26) | |-> > 42 26 Jan Qin Xin ( 9) | `->[R] how could I add > legends > 43 27 Jan Ko-Kang Kevin Wang ( 31) | `-> > 44 N 26 Jan Remigijus Lapinskas ( 32) |->Re: [R] Plotting > coloured his > 45 N 26 Jan Damon Wischik (125) `-> > 46 N 25 Jan Rex_Bryan at urscorp.com ( 10) [R] plotting primatives, > ellipse > 47 N 25 Jan Uwe Ligges ( 19) `-> > > > As Martin Maechler explained some time ago, it also screws up the > archives for a similar reason. > > Your cooperation will be greatly appreciated. > > best > >