[rt-users] patch to enable email threading with RT 3.0.2

[Daniel E. Eisenbud]

On Tue, May 20, 2003 at 11:02:38PM -0400, Jesse Vincent <jesse at bestpractical.com> wrote:
> > I'm going to try to implement this.  Additionally, each message should
> > have as its first reference the "true" message-id of the first
> > transaction in the ticket, so all the different scrip-specific subtrees
> > will be threaded together at the top level by smart mailers.
> > 
> > I'm going to punt, for now, on dealing with references to correspondence
> > that's not cc'ed to the ticket.  It's not obvious to me whether I'll
> > want to go back and do that later, but it shouldn't be too hard if it
> > seems warranted.  In the case of a ticket being generated by a reply to
> > a previous thread, the first reference will at least attach it to that
> > thread.
> 
> That works for me. It may be worth considering the case of merged
> tickets.

Hmm, yes.  Well, I think there's actually not a lot to do about merged
tickets, because if you have a tree starting with a root of the first
transaction of one ticket and another tree starting with a root of the
first transaction of another ticket, and neither of those tickets refer
to each other, no sane mailer is going to pay attention to some distant
descendant claiming that one is the parent of the other (or else I could
be annoying and send mail to this mailing list that caused everyone's
mutt to thread all the last month's messages into one thread, in some
arbitrary order.)  If the root message-ids don't refer to actual
messages that have ever existed (and often they won't, because users
will only ever see the munged message-ids from RT, and the root will be
the only pure one) you could send a special message whose grandparent
was one root and whose grandparent was the other, and that would be
enough to convince mutt to thread the two trees together.  One could
make all new top-level messages do such a thing, but it would have other
mildly annoying threading consequences, and I think it's better not to.

So unless we get into silliness like making RT send out a special mail
when tickets get merged in an attempt to glue mutt users' trees
together, there's nothing useful we can do here, I think.  (I might be
tempted to implement such a glue message as a local hack, though, with a
scrip that sends it just to the mutt-users on the ticket.  :-)  But
probably not.)

-Dan