NavList:

Marcel, you wrote:
"You must have had some good intention to modify how the mails have so far been 'handled'."

I'll try to explain what's going on. Over the past couple of years, I've been migrating email delivery from an external service (that's what crashed last weekend) to an internal service. I switched a few dozen more this week. Since message numbers have been managed until now by that external service, I need to make a few changes to generate message numbers internally. That's why I've added them back into the NavList subject tag in addition to the fact that some NavList members have requested them more than once. The immediate goal is to make that external service less critical.

You wrote:
"I guess because the mail addresses "from" and "reply to" are different I receive now each time a warning: "This message may not have been sent by: ...""

It's not because of the difference in 'from' and 'reply to' addresses. It's much trickier than that. This is not a "normal" function of email software --it's a "clever feature". Your email software is attempting to let you know that the 'from' address has been "spoofed" because that might be a good indication of spam. You may be able to turn off that warning by listing "fer3.com" as a 'safe' sender. I will see what I can find out with respect to gmail settings. We have lots of NavList email recipients who use gmail, so if anyone knows a way to deal with this, please let us know (by off-list email please!).

You also wrote:
"NavList sends new a mail also to the author of a mail."

This is NORMAL. You were set up to receive copies of your own messages for many years. I am surprised that you weren't previously. Perhaps that's a local setting in your email software? In any case, most users specifically prefer to receive copies of their own messages if they're receiving NavList messages by email at all (about half of active NavList users interact primarily via the message boards, and none of these email issues affect them directly).

You wrote:
"Firefox (or is it the gmail account?) has the helpful feature of collecting mails with the same subject in a thread. By adding numbers in the heading each mail is now considered a different subject and starts a new thread."

Well, you know, message numbers are NOT NEW in NavList messages. For example, have a look at your own message from December 2008 here:
http://fer3.com/arc/m2.aspx/Longest-year-since-1992-Tschudin-dec-2008-g6833
You can see that this was message number 6833, which is part of the current number sequence so that means we've had just about 15,000 messages in the past four years. And you can also see that the message number was included in the NavList tag at that time. Message numbers in the subject line were present from July 2006 through December 2009. About two-thirds of NavList email recipients can now see the message numbers again. They are also common in other email-delivered mailing lists. I subscribe to a couple myself that have message numbers in the subject line.

Paul Hirose, you wrote:
"Actually, Thunderbird relies primarily on the In-Reply-To header to sort
messages into threads. If In-Reply-To is missing, it sorts by Subject."
and:
"Two years ago we had In-Reply-To headers in NavList messages: [...]
Unfortunately, they disappeared quite a while ago. I haven't complained
since the messages still show up. They're just not as well organized as
those from other discussion groups."

Aha! That I can fix without too much trouble. The clue here was that you mentioned 'two years ago'. That's about when I switched you, Paul, to a different delivery option so that you could receive text-only copies of NavList messages. I never got around to adding the extra headers, but I can fix that this weekend. I am glad you mentioned it!

By the way, if anyone has any issues with technical aspects of NavList email delivery, please email me off-list at Frank[at]ReedNavigation.com. Thanks!

-FER

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