HiJacking Threads Was: hostapd for Fedora 10

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 8:00 PM, Tim <ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> Tim:
>>> You can test for that yourself with any collection of messages belonging
>>> to a thread, remove the messages linked directly together by the
>>> in-reply-to headers.  (Copy a thread to a test folder, remove the every
>>> second generation of messages.)
>
> Patrick O'Callaghan:
>> That's an ingenious idea. I tried it with Evolution and indeed it
>> works, so Evo at least *does* appear to take note of the References
>> header. All the same, when I delete the common parent of two messages
>> (which were previously at the same hierarchical level) then one
>> appears as the parent of the other, even when I turn off the "fall
>> back on Subject threading" option, so the conclusion is not completely
>> iron-clad, i.e. Evo seems to be doing something else (I checked
>> carefully that neither message had the Message-ID of the other
>> anywhere in its headers.)
>
> Do you have another client installed to compare behaviours?
>
> I think the fall back might be additionally sort by date, but I'd expect
> them to appear as children to the initial post.  Though the order of
> messages listed in the references header might be used.

I did a cursory test with Thunderbird (not the current version but a
preview of version 3, so it might not apply to v2) and it seems to be
basically the same as Evo. One thing I noticed is that when a parent
is deleted the first descendant is promoted to be the new parent, even
if other siblings exist, i.e. there's no representation of a "missing
parent". The eldest son takes over as head of the family :-) This also
applies to Evo.

poc