Subject: Re: #1008 USEFOR 1.5 "followup": summary so far

From: John Stanley <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2005 15:10:10 -0700 (PDT)

"Ruud H.G. van Tol" <rvtol@xxxxxxxxxxxx>:

>You obviously missed the "only" in the first sentence that you quote
>from my text.

I obviously did no such thing. Sorting by subject does not include date 
headers, otherwise it would be called "sorting by making things up" and 
not just "sort by subject".

>With "threading on Subject", 

Threading on Subject does not exist. It is "sorting by subject". You
obviously missed the entire paragraph where I pointed out that the Subject
header has NO article relationship information, and thus cannot be used to
identify threads.

>It is threading,

Nonsense.

>because the software uses whatever it finds to
>detect followup-relations between messages, 

The Subject header contains NO information regarding followup relations
between messages, so using the Subject header to detect followup relations
is impossible. The Date header contains no information about followup
relations, so ditto. The body is UNSTRUCTURED. Nothing plus nothing plus
nothing is nothing, not "just like a References header". 

>and presents them in a
>tree-structure just like if there was a References-header to go by.

The fact that some clients lie to the user and pretend that there is some
relationship when none can be detected is unfortunate and should be
corrected (but not by us), and is not an excuse for an IETF working group
to propogate the lie. A thread is a group of related articles, which can
only be detected by the References header.

>Such algorithms are also nice to use 

Obviously you missed the part where I said yeah, people LIKE sorting by 
subject etc, but that still doesn't make it threading, and that sorting by 
Subject is neither a) necessary nor b) relevant to a discussion about 
References. Nothing we do about References headers will make sorting by 
Subject either more or less correct, even ignoring that the current level 
of "correct" is zero.

---

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 02 Jun 2005 14:42:30 +0200

This thread is far enough off topic that I'm changing the subject line...

> header has NO article relationship information, and thus cannot be used to

John, I believe you are using language stronger than is justified.

If you check out draft-ietf-imapext-thread-13 (the draft is expired, 
unfortunately), you will find the method called ORDEREDSUBJECT referred to 
as "threading" - the fact that you do not like this particular name for 
this way of ordering messages does not mean that you have the right to 
claim that it "does not exist".

                     Harald