[OFB Cafe] Threading (was: BioFuels)

[Chris Olson]

From: Derek Broughton

> Why would it suggest that?  If nobody else has a problem with your threading, 
> then the problem's at my end.  If everybody else has a problem with your 
> threading it doesn't matter how well it looks in Live Mail.

>From what I remember (again, I'm not a computer person anymore), the References: header is what some email programs use solely for threading, and this is the only thing used on newsgroups (RFC1036).  OE never used the References: header, instead it generated only the mandatory In-Reply-To: header and simply grouped by subject for its own threading (and for the Microsoft bashers - if you check RFC822 the References: header is optional and both headers can be used for this purpose in email).

WLM, like OE, does not use a References: header.  In the absence of a References: header GNU Mailman copies the In-Reply-To: header, which contains the Message-ID of the message being responded to, to its own References: header and tacks it on the message, which then breaks the threading in clients that use only the References: header because it mangles something in the copy.  IIRC, you can copy and paste this header into a plain text editor such as pico and see the "extra" characters (or lack thereof - can't remember which it is) that causes it to be mangled.

If you would wish to try this out, we could send several messages back and forth off-list, and keep replying to them to build a thread, and you'll see that threading will work fine in your MUA once you take GNU Mailman out of the picture.

Again, we did fix this problem in Mailgust when we used it, however, I no longer have the code to that program, and I believe Mailgust is no longer even supported or developed.  So there's no way I can go back in time to see exactly what we did to fix it.  I would have no clue how to fix it in GNU Mailman.

> By 'crippled' you mean 'actually know how to thread'.  Grouping mail by 
> subject is not a thread.

Never said it was, but OE used to do it that way - WLM does not.  Windows Live Mail uses the In-Reply-To: header for threading.
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Chris