* James Mohr (suse_mailing_list@jimmo.com) [030423 12:45]:
Actually ezmlm-idx, the list manager we use, doesn't rely on message IDs or reference headers for exactly this reason. All of the threading in the archives is done by normalizing the subject. [snip]
Aha. Thanks for the, Christopher. It's always a good day when I learn something new. While this does help with the archives, I see the normalizing the subject would be difficult in the "real time" of a mailing list. Or am I missing something?
Not really. I have mutt sort by by threads and unset strict_threads so that both the references and subject information is used. Of course, strict_threads would be ideal (and maybe faster) but as long as people use broken mail clients it makes mailing lists hard to read. Even this compromise doesn't work on mailing lists run by very broken stuff like the Lyris list manager on Windows. No references, the message-ids get munged, and the software is so stupid that it will repeatedly insert the list into the subject (e.g., 'Subject: [SLE] Re: [SLE] blah').
Were you talking about this header?
X-Message-Number-for-archive: 141961
Yes, it's also in the sender from.
So, if I wanted all the messages to a thread, I simply look at the header any message and pull out this number. Is that right?
Yep. There are a few other archive command as well, email suse-linux-e-help to see them. -- -ckm