[rt-users] Email threading in RT 3.0.2: worse than in RT 2

[Daniel E. Eisenbud]

On Mon, May 12, 2003 at 05:53:32PM +0200, Dirk Pape <pape-rt at inf.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> in RT 2.0.14 we loved that RT keeps threading information well. It gave 
> "In-Reply-To" an "References" Header correctly to customer and admin 
> emails, so MUAs which support threading, displayed the email correspondance 
> hierarchical.
> 
> Since RT3 the feature has gone. There is always exactly one "In-Reply-To" 
> Header to a artificial message id rt<ticketnr>@<rt-name>, hence threading 
> in MUAs does not work.
> 
> Will you give us the threading feature again?

Moreover, RT's In-Reply-To: header contains the first real message-id
I've seen that fails mutt's heuristic for detecting message-ids.  This
is necessary because syntactically, message-id and email address aren't
always distinguishable in in-reply-to headers from old mailers, and was
annoying when mutt threaded together all the replies to messages by
certain users.

Might I suggest the behavior of preserving In-Reply-To and References,
but perhaps also assigning a longer ticket message-id, and using it in
in-reply to if there is no preexisting in-reply-to.  In addition, it
could be added as the oldest ancestor in references (probably a good
idea to make sure that it isn't already there somewhere first) so all
conversations about the ticket would get attached together at the top
level by smart mailers like mutt.

-Dan