Tooo many messages on this mailing list?? How to avoid being swamped ...

well said.

       One thing that bothers me re. this threading,
          is that if the subject line is changed in any way, it starts a
new thread.

On my email client (OSX std email client) it does.
That doesn;t seem to happen very often, though.

Rob.

Hi :slight_smile:
+1
to everyone so far :)) Thanks Anne-ology! :slight_smile:

I get the impression that some email-clients, maybe Thunderbird, ignores
the words in the subject line and uses something from the coding in the
headers (which are usually hidden).

I know that Forwarding an email "breaks it out" into a new thread but i've
not tried breaking it out in this way but then using the same
subject-line. I imagine that differnt email-clients would handle that very
differently from each other.

Anyway the point i was making was that Rob Jasper's point about
Conversations / Threading was "spot on" and i'd totally missed it in my
previous post.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Hi :slight_smile:
+1
to everyone so far :)) Thanks Anne-ology! :slight_smile:

I get the impression that some email-clients, maybe Thunderbird, ignores
the words in the subject line and uses something from the coding in the
headers (which are usually hidden).

Using subject (and presumably date and possibly any "re" prefix) will always break.

I believe the proper way is to use the message-id and in-reply-to headers to reconstruct the thread.

Thunderbird does this for me - except on emails from this list, which leads me to suspect the LO list processor is tinkering with something it shouldn't. Irritating.

IMBW.

Not in mail clients which use the Message-Id and References: headers for threading. They keep replies in threads regardless of the subject line. SeaMonkey (and most likely Thunderbird) do that, as do many others.

MS Outlook seems to ignore the References: header and uses some sort of heuristic analysis of the subject line, so changing the subject groups messages into a separate conversation. I don't know if any other mail clients do that. Seems like a difficult way of doing things, when there are standard headers for doing precisely that in a reliable way, without unreliably heuristics!

On the other hand, some replies (including yours, here) appear to me in a separate thread despite having the same subject, because they don't include the References: header. I guess you (and others which do this) are posting using MS Outlook or Live Mail, or perhaps a mobile phone / tablet app.

Mark.

Mike Scott wrote:

Hi :slight_smile:
+1
to everyone so far :)) Thanks Anne-ology! :slight_smile:

I get the impression that some email-clients, maybe Thunderbird, ignores
the words in the subject line and uses something from the coding in the
headers (which are usually hidden).

Using subject (and presumably date and possibly any "re" prefix) will
always break.

I believe the proper way is to use the message-id and in-reply-to
headers to reconstruct the thread.

Thunderbird does this for me - except on emails from this list, which
leads me to suspect the LO list processor is tinkering with something it
shouldn't. Irritating.

Most emails appear correctly threaded to me, using SeaMonkey (based on Thunderbird). Some messages break threading, because those sending them use a mail client which doesn't include the relevant headers.

Mark.

All replies by anne-ology start a new thread (gmane on Thunderbird).

Hi :slight_smile:
That is weird. GMane is meant to work well with this mailing list.

In GMail Anne-ology's replies do appear to be part of the same
conversation/thread. Gmail doesn't break it out into a new thread. So
Gmail must be using the subject-line then surely?

Should we be posting a bug-report about this mailing list or about GMane?
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Most emails appear correctly threaded to me, using SeaMonkey (based on
Thunderbird). Some messages break threading, because those sending them
use a mail client which doesn't include the relevant headers.

Mark.

All replies by anne-ology start a new thread (gmane on Thunderbird).

He is the only one with no

In-Reply-To: <parent-ID@host.com>

in the header.

This reply is being sent from my Android phone using MailDroid. I don't think it'll break threading except in receiving clients that use the subject for threading like Pegasus Mail for Windows does.

Stays in the tread for me :slight_smile:

Mac OS X Lion 10.7.5 - Mail version 5.3

Rob.

Hi :slight_smile: Breaks it ut for me. GMail on a Chromebook right now.

So i think that confirms my GMail account does threading by the
subject-line. There might be a setting to change that but i don't want to
poke around with it right now. Maybe when i get back to my desktop i might
have a look.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

James E Lang wrote:

This reply is being sent from my Android phone using MailDroid. I
don't think it'll break threading except in receiving clients that
use the subject for threading like Pegasus Mail for Windows does.

Yep, your reply has the in-reply-to: and references: headers, and appears properly with the rest of the thread (at least in Mozilla SeaMonkey). I didn't mean to imply that all mobile apps break threading.

Personally, I'd say the bug is with the likes of Outlook and GMail, for relying on an unreliable analysis of the subject line instead of using (or even inserting) the headers intended specifically for threading messages! But good luck getting anything done about them...

There's nothing the mailing list would be able to do - it just sends on the messages it receives. I guess GMane might be able to analyse the subjects when displaying threads in its web interface, but then it would end up linking messages which aren't related (e.g. every email with a subject of "help" would appear as the same thread, regardless of whether they're actually different problems and perhaps even sent months apart).

PS. Somewhat ironic that an email about getting a lot of messages on this list has generated such a lot of messages... ;o)

PPS. I'm sure some smartarse will point out that it's not actually irony but something else; I can never remember the difference...

Tom Davies wrote:

Alright! This is a forwarded message with the subject changed, the body trimmed, and sent from a different eMail account (Gmail) to really try to break the threading. I'm also sending a BCC of it to a separate Gmail address of mine that won't route the message through this list. Let's see what happens to threading of everything.

My mail client in this case is MailDroid on my phone. I might originate a copy of this test on my other two eMail clients later. Sorry, since this topic is not about LO.

I will read this thread on both Gmail accounts and the non Gmail account that is subscribed to this list. I'll use MailDroid on my Android phone, Pegasus Mail on a Windows desktop, and Mulberry Mail on a Linux laptop. All three use the IMAP interface to all accounts and i will examine the threading headers (In-Reply-To and References).