Date: Tue, 25 Mar 1997 16:21:18 -0500 (EST) From: John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu> To: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> Cc: Amancio Hasty <hasty@rah.star-gate.com>, jmb@freefall.freebsd.org, langfod@dihelix.com, hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Cool Web page interface to mail + search engine? Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.95q.970325160532.2803V-100000@fallout.campusview.indiana.edu> In-Reply-To: <199703252049.NAA25652@phaeton.artisoft.com>
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On Tue, 25 Mar 1997, Terry Lambert wrote: > Then riddle me this: > > How can I reply to a message with a date stamp earlier than the > original message? > > It seems to me that threading would be implicit. Topic drift is a common occurence. A collection of messages sharing a subject line and temporal proximity may, in time, become very distinct threads, although they share a common origin. Subject and date stamps can ensure correct absolute ordering but in numerous cases, the threading quality will be abysmal. There are two problems in threading: determing what thread a message belongs to and correctly positioning the message in the thread. With reliable In-Reply-To fields, date and subject are more or less irrelevant for both problems. Without reliable In-Reply-To fields, guess work with dates and subjects is about the best you can do. Many messages have reliable In-Reply-To fields, but enough don't that the best possible solution will need to use all three bits of information (message id, date, subject). -john
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