MUA rethreading (was: Re: Meltdown – Spectre - Was: kernel 4.4.0-108 / 16.04 LTS does not boot anymore

[Peter Flynn]

On 13/01/18 11:17, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
[...]
> Actually I'm the OP of this thread ;). You messed up this thread,
> with the original thread, but note, this thread was not in reply to
> the original thread, it's a new opened thread. You could notice the 
> difference, if you let your MUA sort by thread.

I've been banging on about this for a couple of decades. It's entirely 
possible that the poster referred to *is* using an MUA that sorts by 
thread — the problem is that some replies are not in the thread.

 From observation, there seem to be two reasons for this:

1. There are users who don't know how to Reply, and instead use Forward
    or even Compose an entirely new message, and then copy and paste the
    Subject.

2. There are MUAs which don't preserve the headers necessary for the
    propagation of the thread, so replies are sent without the References
    or In-Reply-To headers. This breaks the thread, even though it
    preserves the Subject.

I have tried to argue to the authors of MUAs that they could perform a 
service to the human race by adding a Rethread feature. This would allow 
the user to click on a message line of a wrongly-threaded message or 
collapsed group of messages in the summary pane (assuming a traditional 
interface with a summary pane and a text pane below it or beside it), 
and drag and drop the message[s] onto the thread where it/they belong[s].

The feature would then rewrite the headers necessary for the message[s] 
to remain in place for the future. There appears to be a plugin for 
Tbird which includes something akin to this, but mixed in with a huge 
amount of other features, and reported to be buggy. I have also 
petitioned Hiri (new MUA for Exchange) to look at doing this.

For people who rely on threading to manage email, this feature would 
remediate the two problems above. In an ideal world, of course, we would 
educate the users who don't know how to use email, and get rid of the 
fauty software, but in the absence of a magick wand, a Rethread feature 
would be a major help.

///Peter