[Mailman-Users] Threading for integration with message board

[Robert Hsiung]

At 12:21 PM -0700 10/2/06, Mark Sapiro wrote:

>Mailman's archives are threaded based on the Message-ID: of one post
>being in either the In-Reply-To: or References: header (or both) of a
>subsequent post.
>
>This is an incomplete solution fo a number of reasons including:
>
>1) Not all MUAs include either a In-Reply-To: or References: header in
>replies.
>
>2) People 'hijack' threads by creating a new post as a reply to a
>previously received post.
>
>3) Replies to posts in 'plain' format digests won't be threaded even if
>they have a proper Subject:.
>
>4) A direct recipient of a post which is delayed in reaching the list
>can post a reply which reaches the list before the original. In this
>case the reply isn't threaded even after the original arrives.

Thanks for all the responses!

#1 could be addressed by embedding, as I described, the message 
number in the original Reply-To: header, because then you could count 
on it being included in the To: header of replies.

#2 isn't a software issue, threads are "hijacked" on message boards, too.

#3 could be addressed by having separate digests for each thread, but 
I know, that could be a lot of digests. IMO, if people didn't want to 
deal with lots of email, the thing to do would be to switch to the 
message board.  :-)

#4 seems like it would be easy to fix, since you know the posts 
belong together and which came first.

OK, I can get my message board to "be a mailing list" as far as 
sending out posts by email to selected members. So I'll probably just 
go with that. But it won't have Mailman's features, which as far as 
user options seem to be:

* ack
* not metoo
* nodupes
* digest
* plain
* language

Is it possible to get Mailman to insert a variable "+detail" in the 
Reply-To headers? If so, I could use my threading system and Mailman 
both...

--

At 12:26 PM +0900 10/3/06, <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:

>I've heard rumors that there's a Perl module on CPAN implementing
>Jamie's algorithm.

Thanks for the tip. In fact, there are two, the latter possibly based 
on the former:

Mail::Thread
Perl implementation of JWZ's mail threading algorithm
Mail-Thread-2.5 - 27 May 2004 - Simon Cozens
http://search.cpan.org/author/SIMON/Mail-Thread-2.5/Thread.pm

Email::Thread
Use JWZ's mail threading algorithm with Email::Simple objects
Email-Thread-0.71 - 21 Jul 2006 - Ricardo SIGNES
http://search.cpan.org/author/RJBS/Email-Thread-0.71/lib/Email/Thread.pm

I'm not sure how I'd use them to maintain threading in an ongoing 
way, however. I can feed them a bunch of messages and they can thread 
them, but I don't think I'd want to redo that every time a new 
message came in...

--

At 3:49 PM +0100 10/3/06, Tim Walter wrote:

>If it is of help I use MM and a Fusetalk forum that integrates both 
>directions, relatively easy to set up.  I heard reports of another 
>BB that works, I seem to recall it was fudforum, might be worth 
>looking up.

At 11:19 PM -0400 10/3/06, Jeff Donsbach wrote:

>Mail2Forum might give you a good start -
>
>http://sourceforge.net/projects/m2f/

Thanks, but I don't think I want to switch to a different forum 
(Mail2Forum seems to work with only phpBB, at least right now)...

Bob