Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Tanner Lovelace <lovelace AT wayfarer.org>]

Alan MacHett said the following on 3/8/04 1:22 PM:

> Someone with mail system skills, please, explain this to me.  (I suppose
> it would help to know what mail client Tanner uses.)  Is it the fault of
> Tanner's client (recipient) or of Tony's (sender)?  What about an email
> determines its attachment or not to a given thread?  The INW archives
> support Tanner's complaint:
> https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/internetworkers/2004-March/thread.html#14556

Hi Alan,

If you look at the headers of the message Tony replied to you'll find:

Message-Id: <1078758947.19242.32.camel AT jeremy.dtcc.cc.nc.us>

And if you then look at Tony's message you'll see:

In-Reply-To: <1078758947.19242.32.camel AT jeremy.dtcc.cc.nc.us>
Message-Id: <E1B0MYX-000423-IP AT sq.notsleepy.com>

To keep with this theme, here's what's in my reply to Tony:

Message-ID: <404C9921.4010803 AT wayfarer.org>
References: <E1B0MYX-000423-IP AT sq.notsleepy.com>
In-Reply-To: <E1B0MYX-000423-IP AT sq.notsleepy.com>

And finally, here's what your message replying to me contains:

Message-ID: <50233.68.157.44.201.1078770174.squirrel AT public.ibiblio.org>
References: <E1B0MYX-000423-IP AT sq.notsleepy.com>
        <404C9921.4010803 AT wayfarer.org>
In-Reply-To: <404C9921.4010803 AT wayfarer.org>

It should be pretty obvious now what's happening.  When you reply
to a message, your mailer adds either a References or an In-Reply-To
header (or both!) with a reference to the e-mail you're replying to.
This lets a mail program thread messages without having to guess
based on something like subject header lines (which wouldn't work
in any case here except your reply to me because the subject line
was changed each time).

Note, this also explains why some messages get disconnected from
threads.  If a mail program doesn't add these headers there's no
way to tell it's part of a thread other than guessing.

> I routinely start new threads as replies to old ones (thereby saving
> myself those few precious seconds of typing an address or pulling it from
> the addressbook  ;), yet I haven't received any comment from Tanner.  This
> leads me to believe either
> (a) Tanner never receives my messages,

Nope, looks like I've got lots of your messages in my INW mailbox.

> (b) Tanner ignores | dev/nulls my messages, or

Nope, I even have one of them marked because it was something I wanted
to remember at the time (something about the do-not-call list).

> (c) something about one or the other of our mail clients allows my
> messages to be properly re-threaded.

Nope.

(d) It's been an annoyance before but this is the first time
I've mentioned it.

> curious in a technical, but not too technical, sort of way,
> Alan

Hopefully that clears up some things.  If you want the full
technical detail, the link to Jamie Zawinski's page is very good.

Cheers,
Tanner
--
Tanner Lovelace       | Don't move! Or I'll fill ya full of... little
lovelace AT wayfarer.org | yellow bolts of light! - Commander John Crichton