Re: inacccurate threading: multiple topics in one thread

Tech-Archive recommends: Speed Up your PC by fixing your registry

From: Vanguardx (see_signature)
Date: 10/29/04 

Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 21:11:53 -0500

"john gibb" <jgibb1@earthlink.net>
wrote in news:vcggd.5265$kM.641@newsread3.news.pas.earthlink.net:
> Hi,
>
> 1) can one easily alter the Message-ID before replying or forwarding?

No, because it must be a unique string assigned to only that message.
Unless you are willing to track every message you ever send and manually
add a string then there would be no point to adding a message ID header.
There is also a syntax to the message ID string (I didn't memorize it
other than <string>@<somedomainID>. Unless your e-mail client lets you
add headers on-the-fly (can't think of one that does) then you won't be
able to add it to your e-mail client's copy of the outbound message.

There is a trick when using OE to send newsgroup posts but it won't work
with e-mail. For newsgroup posts, use View -> All Headers. Then enter
some string, like "world", in the Keywords field, hit Enter to get
another line in that field, and then enter "<headername>: <headervalue>"
(and you can repeat hitting Enter to get more new lines in the Keywords
field). The recipients will see the extra lines as separate lines
(because the Keywords field was terminated with the CR-LF sequence when
you hit Enter when within that field). This trick won't work with
e-mail and is only for OE. Other newsreaders and e-mail clients have
different feature sets so you'll have to check if them permit adding a
user-defined header.

> 2) could you elaborate on "The same doesn't hold true for e-mail
> replies."?

A usenet post gets a Message-ID header (I've never seen one that didn't
have one). RFC 1036 requires that the Message-ID header get added. A
reply to a post also gets its own Message-ID header, but it also adds a
References header or appends to it the Message-ID of the post to which
it is replying (i.e., the child post records the Message-ID of its
parent post). According to section 2.2.5, "This field lists the
Message-ID's of any messages prompting the submission of this message.
It is required for all follow-up messages, and forbidden when a new
subject is raised." This allows chaining of posts regardless that some
user might alter the Subject header.

For the first or originating post:
    Message-ID: <origMsgID>
For a reply (reply1):
    References: <origMsgID>
    Message-ID: <reply1msgID>
For a reply to that reply (reply2):
    References: <origMsgID> <rely1msgID>
    Message-ID: <reply2msgID>
For a reply to the originating post (reply3):
    References: <origMsgID>
    Message-ID: <reply3msgID>
For a reply to that reply (reply3):
    References: <origMsgID> <reply3msgID>
    Message-ID: <reply4msgID>

So you get a thread that looks like:

    orig
      |__ reply1
      | |__ reply2
      |__ reply3
           |__ reply4

Works great to thread the posts by chaining through the message IDs.
Doesn't work for e-mail because both the Message-ID and References or
In-Reply-To headers are optional. A high percentage of spam will have
the Message-ID header missing, but lots of legitimate (non-spam) e-mail
will also omit this header. That immediately breaks the ability to
chain the messages together. Even if the Message-ID header is present,
the References header is also optional and rarely used (although I have
seen messages with the In-Reply-To header to perform chaining). Even
when the Message-ID and References or In-Reply-To headers are present,
rarely do they chain further than to the parent message (i.e., the one
you replied to). If each message chained to at least its parent message
then tracking through the chain would be possible but I don't know if
Outlook [Express] bothers with hunting around for a copy of a message
where its Message-ID is equal to the one listed in the References
header. So it defaults to matching up the posts by looking at just the
content of the Subject header. If you get lots of e-mails with "Weekly
Progress Report" for several different weeks from several employees,
they might all end up under one thread.

The short story is: If the software don't do that, it don't do that.
Outlook [Express] might not group the e-mail threads together as you
expect. OE works much better when threading usenet posts together
because the References header (which is required) provides the tracking
needed to chain together the posts into threads and subthreads.

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