Don’t touch that subject line!
Jason Clarke takes exception 
to an often-repeated productivity tip (e.g. on Lifehacker ) that subject lines should be edited to reflect the content of the message.
He points out that this will bust the threading on Gmail and other email clients (like Mail.app - as Greg rightly points out in the comments, Mail.app is not fooled by edited subject lines, but lists all the messages in the same thread.)
So the short term gain of added communication has to be balanced against the longer term loss of archive and search functionality.
Tags: Apple Mail, archiving, edit, GMAIL, mail.app, subject line, threadingRelated posts
January 22nd, 2006 at 4:27 am
This is only a problem because the threading on Gmail and Mail.app is broken, ignoring the References: and In-Reply-To: headers and relying on the subject line instead. However, all the information that the clients need to thread properly is saved in the messages, so I’m willing to count on the apps fixing their bugs and full threading being restored to those messages in the future.
January 22nd, 2006 at 1:29 pm
Are you sure this busts the threading? I use threading to review individual e-mails from my Yahoo! group, and the threading includes messages with a changed subject line as lon as the REPLY button was used to create the e-mail.
January 22nd, 2006 at 4:23 pm
Sometimes I *wish* Mail.app’s threading were broken. I’m so tired of people hijacking mailing list messages to send their responses, only to have the completely new thread show up as a reply to some previous message. Unfortunately many people don’t seem to realize just how good Mail.app is at managing threads!
January 31st, 2006 at 7:15 am
Compared with Mulberry (the unfortunate victim of ISAMET/Cyrusoft’s bankruptcy last year), my experience with Apple Mail threading has been frustratingly disappointing since it does client-side sorting/threading and ignores data provided by IMAP servers that implement the IMAP SORT and THREAD Extension (based on Jamie Zawinski’s classic message threading article).