[Users] Message-ID

[Rich Pieri]

On Fri, 1 Feb 2013 02:17:23 +0000
RW <rwmaillists at googlemail.com> wrote:

> The answer is that you can't, and if can't be done in USENET how can
> it possibly work in email.

Did you miss the part where I wrote about how there are no standards
compliant ways of doing this with mail? Did you fail to infer from it
that the only ways to thread mail are perforce non-standard? MUA
developers like JWZ and Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen solved it as best as
possible back in the mid 1990s.

You can use Subject fields to cluster related messages together. You
can use messages with useful References and In-Reply-To fields to
identify disconnected messages. If you're feeling especially clever
then you can look for reply boilerplate in the first few lines of the
message body. You can use time stamps to order messages chronologically.

That's just my very vague recollections from the discussions on the
(ding) Gnus mailing list back around 1995 when we were working out how
to address the issue of useless Message-ID fields.

It's not impossible. It's been done.

-- 
Rich P.