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

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sat, 13 Jan 2018 20:26:06 +0000, Peter Flynn wrote:
>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

Actually I'm not sorting by thread, but since I changed the subject
(and for good reasons started a new thread, too), I hoped replies to
each thread as well as each subject would be separated from each other.
Fortunately it wasn't hard to sort, since I anyway read mails in reply
to both threads/subjects.

However, in some cases this could become a serious issue.