On Thu, 2006-07-06 at 15:55 +0200, Ambrogio wrote: > I see some messages not ordered well. > > So some reply are not related to the right message id and so on. > > It's only my problem or someone else do see this behaviour? Typically caused by someone replying to a message from a digest, some badly implemented web forum, or a crappy mail client. Messages have an "in-reply-to" header which identifies which particular message it is in reply to. Some really crappy clients mightn't include it when replying. They also have "references" header which lists all other other message IDs of the messages in the same thread. Each time a client replies to a message, it adds its own message ID to the list. Some crappy clients don't do that. Both are used together to group messages in a thread, and order them into the right sequence. They can't do that right without that information. Some really crappy clients attempt to do that via the subject lines, through sheer laziness in programming. And since they think it works for them, some don't bother to use the proper headers (write them, add to them, include them, etc.), and bugger it up for everyone else. Microsoft's clients used to work that way, I haven't checked if they still do. Digests (a whole lot of messages spooled together) can keep or lose those headers. If they just bundle plain text message bodies together, it's gone. If they do a MIME digest, where the entire message and headers are kept for each message, proper replies *can* be done, but the replying mail client has to make use of that information when doing its reply. Some don't, or some people using them don't use them properly. -- (Currently running FC4, occasionally trying FC5.) Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
The MS clients (Outlook 2k/2k3) in our office put the In-Reply-To header in, but not the References header, so you can only see threading with a continuous succession of mails. Needless to say, all the Linux clients put both headers in.
Chris
