Re: mea máxima culpa

[David Kastrup]

Kieren MacMillan <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi all,
>
>> I have no idea how your email system would figure out just what mail Tim
>> had been replying to.  The information is just not there in the headers.
>
> Apple Mail uses the Subject (as text), and I imagine there are other
> applications that do the same.

Oh, short of other information, my mailing system groups together
articles with a common subject line in chronological order.  Sure.  But
it has no clue who replied to whom, and it can't fetch related mails
from the server without reading a whole bunch of messages with various
subjects based on their chronological order alone and then trying to
sort based on subject and chronology afterwards.

> This of course leads to any number of frustrations, including "re: re:
> test" not being threaded with "re: test", and mail from completely
> different conversations (with the same subject line) being threaded
> together.

Well yes, a thread is logically a _tree_.  A chronological sort only
renders a list, and that's just not useful for tracking a particular
conversation to its start.

There may be mailing systems that actually can't do better than that
anyway, but most of them should preserve more from the threading.

-- 
David Kastrup