From: David Eisner (cradle@glue.umd.edu)
Date: Mon Apr 16 2001 - 00:35:25 CDT
On Sun, 15 Apr 2001, Peter C. McCluskey wrote:
> The only clear-cut bug was in crossindexthread2. Now that I have removed
> the maybereply check from there, it's hard to tell whether your patch
> improves the threading. I've tested it on 2 archives, and see slightly
> more cases where it improves the threading (by not linking unrelated
> messages that have the same subject) than harms it (by failing to link
> replies which fail to add a Re: to the subject line and lack In-Reply-To's.
I guess it comes down to how often there's a reply that lacks the
In-Reply-To: and also has no "Re:". To me it seems like this would
be pretty rare, but I could be wrong. With the helpdesk list, there
are lots of messages with the Subject "Help", and "Help!" and "Problem",
and I'd hate to see them included in the same thread (for each subject).
I don't know whether this is helpful, but here's the threading algorithm
used in Netscape mail and news 2.0 and 3.0:
http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html
It's probably more trouble than it's worth to implement this. The
current threading (with the fix :^) seems to work fairly well.
-David