Hi Hal,

I'll try to explain what I mean by (e) above. Suppose person A starts a thread. Person B replies to A, and C posts a followup. In C's email, I can see A's message, B's reply and C's final followup. Suppose Person D also replies to the original post (A), and E posts a follow up to D. In E's email, I can see A's original post, D's reply and E's followup. I *do not* see B or C's postings. Likewise, in C's final post, I do not see D or E's posts.

On this web-based system, everything's a bit more of a mush. My reply could be to your post, or someother post further up the page. Unless each poster takes care to identify which post they are replying to, it becomes difficult to see what's going on. It becomes more difficult the more "sub conversations" there are, and the longer each conversation continues.

WRT to point (d) - this web-based system will never be as fast as my using my copy of Outlook Express on my local machine. I click on a message, and it appears instantaneously. Here, I'm clicking backwards and forwards, waiting for pages to load etc.

WRT to point (c) - the ASP.Net forums (www.asp.net/forums) that Microsoft runs has a similar system. You click on a link in a message to post a reply. However, this does not address the point I was trying to make. In my email client, I can see a new thread, -and- I can instantly see who has replied to the original question. If it's someone I know (eg Jeff Mason or David Cameron on an SQL question), then I can leave the question for the time being, feeling confident that it has been answered. With your subscription system, it's not the same. I still need to read each and every email to see who has replied to a given question.

Additionally, and this is a killer for me, I can't see each reply in context (eg what the poster was replying to), because only their reply is included in the email.

Cheers
Ken

PS With the email subscription, the HTML "tags" that people embed in their replies (to get effects on the forums) also seems to be included with the actual reply, which could become irritating if there's lot of such tags

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