Perhaps this is the problem; I'm not aware of
these advantages. What are they? [...]

When a subject line is changed, it is a good indication that the
conversation has changed. (the converse is of course not true).
Perhaps it's a bug (or feature) in my reader (Netscape 7.2) that when
sorting by threads, the sort list can't be alphabetized. In fact, I
can't figure out in what order they are presented (it could be, for
example, the order of the date of the latest post, the earliest post,
the earliest retained post...) My reader saves (on my hard drive) the
last x days worth of posts so that I can go back, even to plonked posts
(which I merely mark as read) without connecting to the net again.

Sometimes people reply (physically) to a post as a convenience, while
replying (semantically) to a different post, or combine replies to
several posts into one (I like when people do that intellegently).

Maybe my sort-by-thread is just buggy. But I doubt I'm the only one
with buggy software.

That is, what happens if one is not reading all and one sorts by thread?

On my reader, you can sort by thread, but you can't pick the order. You
can't collapse threads unless you are viewing all. Of course, viewing
by subject you can't collapse threads either.

Also, sometimes things just "get funky". I can't explain it because I
haven't done it enough - I just go back to reading by subject.

Jose
--
There are two kinds of people in the world. Those that just want to
know what button to push, and those that want to know what happens when
they push the button.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.