[Dovecot] IMAP threading - the THREAD command

Jan Kundrát
2006-04-07T13:50:53Z

Hi folks,
there's an extension [1] to IMAP specifying the THREAD command to return
list of message sequence numbers grouped to indicate the threading of
them. That draft currently defines two algorithms, one of them based
solely on Subjects (which is rather dumb) and the second one, combining
Subjects with In-Reply-To (etc) headers.

The second method is actually advertised and supported by Dovecot.
However, I've got quite a lot of friends that lack the knowledge of what
the "Subject" field is for, so they just leave it empty. The problem
comes when I want Dovecot to return the threads - it follows the ietf
draft, so it doesn't check only for references from message headers, but
also the subjects. The result is that especially those mails with empty
subjects are incorrectly grouped together.

So, I'd like to see a feature that would eliminate this problem. It
seems to me that there are currently two methods:

a) Don't look at the Subject field at all - altough it might increase
the speead a bit, it has some disadvantages as well, namely that you'll
lose threading if someone uses broken mail client (but broken only in
such a way that it preserves subjects)

b) Ignore the Subject field if it is empty (after stripping stuff like
"re:" etc - just as that draft specifies). Seems reasonable, IMHO.

Of course we can't modify the result of a THREAD command (that would
break the standard and it generally isn't a proper way to go), so we'd
have to introduce another one.

I'm pretty sure that especially method a) is very simple (and even
simpler if I decided to break the standard by "fixing" the THREAD
command), but I really don't like <rant>portable assembler
:)</rant>
<politely>C</politely>, so are there any chances for this "new
and
fixed" command to be included into Dovecot? I mean, I might do that in a
flawed and ugly way just for me and post a patch so that possible
interested persons can pick it, or I migth persuade someone to do it,
actually :). Do you think that it's worth the issue?

Does anyone have any experiences with talking to the IETF about possible
extension of their draft?

Ideas?

[1] http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-imapext-sort-17.txt

Cheers,
-jkt

--
cd /local/pub && more beer > /dev/mouth
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