Why I see certain messages from mailing list not ordered corectly by thread

[Chris Linton-Ford]

On Fri, 2006-07-07 at 20:15 +0930, Tim wrote:

> On Thu, 2006-07-06 at 15:55 +0200, Ambrogio wrote:
> > I see some messages not ordered well.
> > 
> > So some reply are not related to the right message id and so on.
> > 
> > It's only my problem or someone else do see this behaviour?
> 
> Typically caused by someone replying to a message from a digest, some
> badly implemented web forum, or a crappy mail client.
> 
> Messages have an "in-reply-to" header which identifies which particular
> message it is in reply to.  Some really crappy clients mightn't include
> it when replying.
> 
> They also have "references" header which lists all other other message
> IDs of the messages in the same thread.  Each time a client replies to a
> message, it adds its own message ID to the list.  Some crappy clients
> don't do that.
> 
> Both are used together to group messages in a thread, and order them
> into the right sequence.  They can't do that right without that
> information.
> 
> Some really crappy clients attempt to do that via the subject lines,
> through sheer laziness in programming.  And since they think it works
> for them, some don't bother to use the proper headers (write them, add
> to them, include them, etc.), and bugger it up for everyone else.
> Microsoft's clients used to work that way, I haven't checked if they
> still do.
> 
> Digests (a whole lot of messages spooled together) can keep or lose
> those headers.  If they just bundle plain text message bodies together,
> it's gone.  If they do a MIME digest, where the entire message and
> headers are kept for each message, proper replies *can* be done, but the
> replying mail client has to make use of that information when doing its
> reply.  Some don't, or some people using them don't use them properly.
> 
> -- 
> (Currently running FC4, occasionally trying FC5.)
> 
> Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.
> I read messages from the public lists.
> 


The MS clients (Outlook 2k/2k3) in our office put the In-Reply-To header
in, but not the References header, so you can only see threading with a
continuous succession of mails. Needless to say, all the Linux clients
put both headers in.

Chris
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