Schik wrote:
If there's an In-Reply-To header, why in the world would it thread by the References: header that's also there?
Because the In-Reply-To is list of ID(s) of the post(s) that's being replied to (which can be all over the place), while References is the IDs of all parent posts in the thread of the current message, which is build by just taking the parent's References header and appending the parent's ID.
The closest thing to In-Reply-To, forum wise, would probably be one of those forums that lets you mark several posts before replying so you can answer several ones in a single post.
So a MUA should really just use the last entry in the references header that it can find in the user's mailbox as the current post's parent for threading as the In-Reply-To can reference just about anything and it's dog.
Of course, the wording in RFC2822 using "
parent"
both for the messages being replied to as well as the posts further up in the threading hierarchy doesn't make understanding things any easier...
Here's an example:
Posts IRT References
1 - -
+-2 1 1
| +-3 2 1,2
| +-4 4 1,2
|
+-5 1 1
+-6 5 1,5
+-7 6 1,5,6
8 - -
+-9 8 8
But hey, since you seem to know more about this than the rest of us, what should happen if a person doesn't have the message that's in the In-Reply-To header?
Like I wrote above, it should start at the end of the References header, work it's way back and use the first existing post. And if it's the root post of the thread that's missing it should promote the first existing post (according to sorting) to the root node.
At least that's the most sensible behaviour I know, and that's incidentally how Netscape 4.x handled things...
Anyway, looking at the spec (RFC 2822) again, you should probably use both In-Reply-To and References (well, not on the first post, obviously), but each containing only the message-id of the very first post in each thread. But even if the References was missing it should sort the posts into a single thread.
And, like I said, I've never used that feature of the board - it's not fine-grained enough, i.e. on a per-thread basis...
np: Alias & Tarsier - Nocturnal Eye (Plane That Draws A White Line)
____________________________
"
I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better."
- Sole
R.I.P. Robert Feldhoff (1962-2009)
[Last edited by Briareos at 03-30-2007 04:21 PM]
.
It'll only affect new messages, and is probably only really visible with new threads.