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How to group Clayart threads(subjects) using your email program:
Any good email program has a feature that automatically groups your emails by subject. With this feature turned on emails with a common subject line(thread) will be grouped together. Think of a thread as a conversation about one subject. The thread will show in your email list as just the first email of that thread. The email will have a symbol next to it showing that there are more emails in the thread. You click on the symbol to expand the list and see all the emails. So your email list is shorter and you can delete whole threads that you don't have time to read. Also you can easily follow threads that keep going over a number of days. This is especially helpful when many people are participating in the thread. It's nice to have the emails grouped together and in order by time. You can then go backwards in the list to see previous parts of the conversation.

I have taken a screen pic of my Clayart folder, shown below. I use my email preferences to put all Clayart posts in one folder, separate from my other home and business emails. I have shown 2 open threads in my Clayart list: anti-intellectualism and wedge table. Note that there are several other threads that I haven't opened. The first one is Cherry's email - mel's i.q. test.

This system uses the subject line to perform it's magic, but if someone hits the reply button in replying to an email and changes the subject line, the reply still goes in that thread. Note Jeannette Harris's post in the anti-intellectialism thread. She calls hers "flow". It stayed in the thread. However if someone starts a new email/subject line when responding to a post(not using the reply button) that post will be by itself, separated from the thread. Also, if someone hits the reply button and then talks about an entirely different thing, that will end up in the thread. Then there will be 2 conversations going on within the thread list.

Anyone who has uses the Clayart Archives will see that the Clayart listserv program uses the exact same system. The weekly list of emails is grouped by subject line. I think any change of subject line puts that email by itself, breaking the thread. So if a lot of people are doing this the "conversation" gets separated into several different places in the list of subjects.

Your own email program may use different language in referring to "threads", etc, but it's a very common feature. I have never liked the digest formatt with all that scrolling. This system makes my Clayart folder very manageable! I hope this helps! - Jennifer