[Users] Message-ID

[RW]

On Thu, 31 Jan 2013 22:05:11 -0500
Rich Pieri wrote:

> 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.

Are you honestly trying to tell me that a sensible threading
implementation will identify the first message in a USENET or mail
thread by subject in preference to the message-id - that's nonsense.