[Mailman-Developers] Need more information about the GSoC idea 'GitLab/development tools integration'

Richard Damon Richard at Damon-Family.org
Sat Mar 12 16:44:28 EST 2016


On 3/12/16 4:19 PM, Wasim Thabraze wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> The GSoC idea states  'a tool that will take a thread from a Mailman
> mailing list and..'. I just wanted to know what are the different ways to
> extract a thread from a mailing list.
>
> I'm actually trying to understand the idea from a couple of days but in
> vain. I couldn't even find documentations related to thread extraction.
>
> Does a thread has any unique id? If yes, how should I extract the thread
> using the id?
>
> Any links that would help me in understanding it in a much more better way?
>
>
>
> Awaiting reply.
>
>
> Thank You
>
>
> Regards,
> Wasim
>   
The normal definition of the 'Thread' is a chain of message linked by 
In-Reply-To: and References: headers to Reference-Id: headers.

Every email message has a unique Reference-Id: header to identify it.

When a person replies to that message, their email program is supposed 
to add a In-Reply-To: header with the Reference-Id of the message it is 
a reply to, or a References: header with a copy of the References: 
header of the message being replied to with the Reference-Id of the 
replied to message added at the beginning (and possibly ones at the end 
trimmed if the header gets too long). This chain defines a 'Thread'.

One wrinkle is with plain text digest users, they tend to not have the 
Reference-Id of the message they are replying to (one of the limitations 
of the plain text digest) so they tend to break threads. The one big 
issue here is that they also often send a message by replying to the 
digest, so two messages that refer to the same message in In-Reply-To: 
or References: headers might not want to be linked together as a thread 
if the common Message-Id isn't present (it is likely the digest). I 
think this is what the current mailman 2 archives do.


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