The 8 stages of an e-mail thread (from IRC):
- Semi-plausible claim
- Several pokes, one of which might be right
- Several more semi-plausible claims
- Someone who knows from whence they speak weighs in
- Several "That's counter-intuitive" statements
- Pissing contest over what's correct vs what's intuitive
- Personal attacks
- Hitler
Greg also mentioned this fine link, which describes [mailing list
threads in
detail](http://web.archive.org/web/http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/thread_patterns/).