MUA rethreading

[Peter Flynn]

On 14/01/18 01:38, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 13, 2018 at 08:26:06PM +0000, Peter Flynn wrote:
>> 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].
> 
> Mutt has such a feature: it's called "link-threads", and bound to the
> "&" key by default. 

Wow :-) I haven't used mutt for years (I was an elm devotee).

> You tag the wrongly-threaded child message with
> "t", move to its correct parent message, press "&", and you're done.

Does that actually munge the headers so that the change is permanent?

> Replies to the tagged child message will be rethreaded as you'd expect,
> unless they themselves have incorrect In-Reply-To (etc.) headers in
> which case you can repeat the procedure.

Good point...given some of my users/correspondents that's entirely 
likely. Of course, a really smart MUA would cache what it had done so 
that it could repeat it automatically for fresh incoming messages :-)

The problem is then that most of my email is either in Exchange or in my 
ISP's IMAP-accessible mailboxes (I don't actually know what their 
backend is). That means that if I download a lab of mail and fix it, I 
then have to find a way to put it back.

Hmm. I know Tbird lets you move messages between systems. I shall 
experiment.


On 14/01/18 07:05, robert wrote:
> there is an other possible cause
> 
> some people are not yet fully awake early in the morning when they
> crank up the computer and stumble across the keyboard to answer their
> first mails.
That also is true. I follow Tom Limoncelli's advice and don't look at 
email until I have done something more interesting and important :-)

///Peter