
hello all,
I am new to python and mailman. i have a problem, need to find a solution asap.
when getting mails to the mailman from Lotus Domino client 5.0.10, the mail's does not have In-Reply-To header. Because of this the mail does not get threaded properly. pls tell me how i can solve this isue.
Thanks Karthikeyan.S

At 5:48 PM +0530 2004-09-28, Karthikeyan wrote:
The short answer is to fix Lotus.
For more information, go to the Mailman FAQ Wizard at
<http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py> and search for "thread".
-- Brad Knowles, <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org>
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755
SAGE member since 1995. See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.

Thanks,
but i need to give a solution in the mailman, as the other party would not want o fine tune theie lotus notes.
I need this from any of you.
Can i please have the architectural flow of how the .py programs are being called.
like which .py calls sends the mail and which therads it. I am trying to analyse whether i can add one header myself. but dunno where to try coz the .py are vast
Thanks a lot.
Brad Knowles wrote:

At 11:01 AM +0530 2004-09-29, Karthikeyan wrote:
but i need to give a solution in the mailman, as the other party would not want o fine tune theie lotus notes.
It is not physically possible to solve this problem from within
Mailman. If the client doesn't put that header in to begin with, there is no amount of artificial intelligence you could add to the program that could determine with 100% certainty as to precisely which message is actually being replied to and which other messages are being referenced.
You could spend a trillion dollars on this problem and not find a
solution. The entire computer industry has been working on AI since the early 1960s, and they haven't solve it yet, and don't appear to be much closer today than they were back then.
-- Brad Knowles, <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org>
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755
SAGE member since 1995. See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.

"Brad" == Brad Knowles <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org> writes:
Brad> You could spend a trillion dollars on this problem and
Brad> not find a solution. The entire computer industry has been
Brad> working on AI since the early 1960s, and they haven't solve
Brad> it yet, and don't appear to be much closer today than they
Brad> were back then.
That's a bit pessimistic, don't you think? What can be done without I-R-T or References doesn't require AI. Plenty of MUAs solve the problem of threading messages with no I-R-T header satisfactorily (ie, messages that are in the same thread almost always appear within a few lines of each other in the summary).
K.S., the problem here is that threading algorithms require data about the other messages in the thread. Mailman handles messages _one at a time_, and does not have the information about other messages (specifically dates and subjects) needed to guess at threading. So forget about hacking Mailman; you'd kill performance, most likely.
On the other hand, an archiver (such as Pipermail, distributed with Mailman, or MHonArc, a popular third-party archiver) does (typically) have that information, at least in "rebuild-the-whole-shebang" mode, and I would say that you should look at archivers, not at Mailman proper. Also look in the mailman FAQ for how to use a 3rd-party archiver with Mailman; you can probably find one that does a better job than Pipermail does. MHonArc would be a good bet.
http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html describes a threading algorithm that is fairly robust to this problem in my limited experience with it
That's as far as I'm willing to go though. Really, you should get your users to switch to an MUA that can handle headers that were standardized in 1975 or so. And there are plenty of MUAs that can do something sane about pseudo-threading messages without I-R-T.
-- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.

At 3:22 PM +0900 2004-10-04, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
I don't think I'm being pessimistic here. I think I'm being
realistic. There are no deterministic ways to figure out precisely which message is being replied to and which other messages are being referenced, unless you can guarantee that you can perfectly parse all possible quoting methods, and you can guarantee that you will always have enough information available in the quote to guarantee that you can determine which message is which.
Unfortunately, in the real world, you can't guarantee any of those things.
In terms of re-creating threading data that was destroyed by an
the MUA? No, I don't think that you're going to find much here.
http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html describes a threading algorithm that is fairly robust to this problem in my limited experience with it
Right, and as complex as this algorithm is, it still requires
"In-Reply-To:" and "References:" headers in order to be able to do it's job.
Now there's a statement that I can agree with.
-- Brad Knowles, <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org>
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755
SAGE member since 1995. See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.

"Brad" == Brad Knowles <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org> writes:
I don't think I'm being pessimistic here. I think I'm being
realistic. There are no deterministic ways to figure out
precisely which message is being replied to and which other
messages are being referenced, unless you can guarantee that
you can perfectly parse all possible quoting methods,
Oh, I admit that. I just suspect that for the OP (1) grouping subjects and (2) never violating Date order will typically result in a Summary display that's "good enough".
If he wants to go so far as parsing quoting, well, I've written such code and it was a dismal failure (ie, it did not improve visibly over sorting by subject and date). Doesn't mean it can't be done, by a long shot ;-), but I would suggest it's cheaper to hire a moderator to do the rethreading.
Brad> Right, and as complex as [jwz's] algorithm is, it still
Brad> requires "In-Reply-To:" and "References:" headers in order
Brad> to be able to do it's job.
Actually, the complex part is all about ensuring that the true threading operations are stable with respect to the subject/date sort. This is something that Gnus (for example) gets wrong. I'd much rather read a newsgroup with Gnus than Netscape 3 (I think it was), but Netscape 3 did a far better job with mailing lists that lacked true threading information.
-- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.

At 5:48 PM +0530 2004-09-28, Karthikeyan wrote:
The short answer is to fix Lotus.
For more information, go to the Mailman FAQ Wizard at
<http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py> and search for "thread".
-- Brad Knowles, <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org>
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755
SAGE member since 1995. See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.

Thanks,
but i need to give a solution in the mailman, as the other party would not want o fine tune theie lotus notes.
I need this from any of you.
Can i please have the architectural flow of how the .py programs are being called.
like which .py calls sends the mail and which therads it. I am trying to analyse whether i can add one header myself. but dunno where to try coz the .py are vast
Thanks a lot.
Brad Knowles wrote:

At 11:01 AM +0530 2004-09-29, Karthikeyan wrote:
but i need to give a solution in the mailman, as the other party would not want o fine tune theie lotus notes.
It is not physically possible to solve this problem from within
Mailman. If the client doesn't put that header in to begin with, there is no amount of artificial intelligence you could add to the program that could determine with 100% certainty as to precisely which message is actually being replied to and which other messages are being referenced.
You could spend a trillion dollars on this problem and not find a
solution. The entire computer industry has been working on AI since the early 1960s, and they haven't solve it yet, and don't appear to be much closer today than they were back then.
-- Brad Knowles, <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org>
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755
SAGE member since 1995. See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.

"Brad" == Brad Knowles <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org> writes:
Brad> You could spend a trillion dollars on this problem and
Brad> not find a solution. The entire computer industry has been
Brad> working on AI since the early 1960s, and they haven't solve
Brad> it yet, and don't appear to be much closer today than they
Brad> were back then.
That's a bit pessimistic, don't you think? What can be done without I-R-T or References doesn't require AI. Plenty of MUAs solve the problem of threading messages with no I-R-T header satisfactorily (ie, messages that are in the same thread almost always appear within a few lines of each other in the summary).
K.S., the problem here is that threading algorithms require data about the other messages in the thread. Mailman handles messages _one at a time_, and does not have the information about other messages (specifically dates and subjects) needed to guess at threading. So forget about hacking Mailman; you'd kill performance, most likely.
On the other hand, an archiver (such as Pipermail, distributed with Mailman, or MHonArc, a popular third-party archiver) does (typically) have that information, at least in "rebuild-the-whole-shebang" mode, and I would say that you should look at archivers, not at Mailman proper. Also look in the mailman FAQ for how to use a 3rd-party archiver with Mailman; you can probably find one that does a better job than Pipermail does. MHonArc would be a good bet.
http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html describes a threading algorithm that is fairly robust to this problem in my limited experience with it
That's as far as I'm willing to go though. Really, you should get your users to switch to an MUA that can handle headers that were standardized in 1975 or so. And there are plenty of MUAs that can do something sane about pseudo-threading messages without I-R-T.
-- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.

At 3:22 PM +0900 2004-10-04, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
I don't think I'm being pessimistic here. I think I'm being
realistic. There are no deterministic ways to figure out precisely which message is being replied to and which other messages are being referenced, unless you can guarantee that you can perfectly parse all possible quoting methods, and you can guarantee that you will always have enough information available in the quote to guarantee that you can determine which message is which.
Unfortunately, in the real world, you can't guarantee any of those things.
In terms of re-creating threading data that was destroyed by an
the MUA? No, I don't think that you're going to find much here.
http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html describes a threading algorithm that is fairly robust to this problem in my limited experience with it
Right, and as complex as this algorithm is, it still requires
"In-Reply-To:" and "References:" headers in order to be able to do it's job.
Now there's a statement that I can agree with.
-- Brad Knowles, <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org>
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755
SAGE member since 1995. See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.

"Brad" == Brad Knowles <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org> writes:
I don't think I'm being pessimistic here. I think I'm being
realistic. There are no deterministic ways to figure out
precisely which message is being replied to and which other
messages are being referenced, unless you can guarantee that
you can perfectly parse all possible quoting methods,
Oh, I admit that. I just suspect that for the OP (1) grouping subjects and (2) never violating Date order will typically result in a Summary display that's "good enough".
If he wants to go so far as parsing quoting, well, I've written such code and it was a dismal failure (ie, it did not improve visibly over sorting by subject and date). Doesn't mean it can't be done, by a long shot ;-), but I would suggest it's cheaper to hire a moderator to do the rethreading.
Brad> Right, and as complex as [jwz's] algorithm is, it still
Brad> requires "In-Reply-To:" and "References:" headers in order
Brad> to be able to do it's job.
Actually, the complex part is all about ensuring that the true threading operations are stable with respect to the subject/date sort. This is something that Gnus (for example) gets wrong. I'd much rather read a newsgroup with Gnus than Netscape 3 (I think it was), but Netscape 3 did a far better job with mailing lists that lacked true threading information.
-- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.
participants (3)
-
Brad Knowles
-
Karthikeyan
-
Stephen J. Turnbull