From: Craig A Summerhill (craig@cni.org)
Date: Mon May 17 1999 - 23:04:32 CDT
On 17 May 1999, Christina Williams Heikkila <cwh@circe.gsfc.nasa.gov> wrote:
>
> One problem with using the In-reply-to message ids to determine threading
> is that many people (including myself) keep a large mail inbox. When we
> want to send an email to a person, we just scroll up to one they sent to
> us, and just reply to it, changing the subject line. This creates threads
> where there shouldn't be.
>
> I don't know if this has come up in the past, or if there's any conceivable
> way to work with this - I'm just throwing it out here in case anyone's
> given it much thought.
Christina,
Using a screwdriver to drive a nail doesn't make the screwdriver
a hammer, and similarly using a backlog of messages in your mail
user agent's indexing function doesn't make it an addressbook. You
might successfully drive a few nails using the screwdriver, but you've
got to expect some skinned knuckles and a few nicks in the wood.
There is an old agage in computer programming that dates to the punch
card era. As the saying goes...
garbage in, garbage out
You can't legislate social intelligence, of course. People are always
going to "break" computer tools by coming up with "creative" ways to
to use the tools which programmers can not envision. But unlike human
beings, computers aren't creative beings. You can't expect a computer
to do much more than process the data which is presented to it.
I for one believe a routine that would try to check the "In-Reply-To:"
or "References:" header against the "Subject:" and make intelligent
inferences about what the human user intended is a) going to be doomed,
to failure and b) is going to significantly increase processing time
in any event.
Personally, I don't want see it happen. I'm already dealing with
large archives...
-- Craig A. Summerhill, Systems Coordinator and Program Officer Coalition for Networked Information 21 Dupont Circle, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036 Internet: craig@cni.org AT&Tnet (202) 296-5098