[Mailman-Users] Inappropriate nesting of threads.

[Chris Malme]

Regarding my earlier query, regarding archive messages breaking, due to to
in message "\nFrom " text; I am pleased to say that Mark's suggestion worked
a treat, and fixed that archive woe. Many thanks.

However, it uncovered another problem, less serious, but fascinating. One of
my users uses a mail client that creates MessageIDs containing the character
"-". As far as I can tell, this is completely legit.

I've discovered that for every "-" in the MessageID, that message is moved
one place across in the nesting of threads. As his MessageID can contain up
to 5 "-" characters, this means any thread he participates in gets messed up
somewhat.

Looking Mailman/Archive/pipermail.py, I can see lines such as

article.threadKey = parent.threadKey + article.date + '/' + article.msgid + '-'

and

self.write_threadindex_entry(article, artkey.count('-') - 1)

which suggests the dash is being used as a delimiter/flag in Pipermail, but
I haven't looked into it in any detail, yet.

Before I do so, or begin to experiment, I thought I would ask if this is a
known problem with a existing solution? I did do a quick search of the
archive, but couldn't find anything obvious. If there isn't an existing fix,
I might try something basic, like a global replacement of "'-'" for "'~'" in
pipermail.py and just see what it does.

As before, running Mailman 2.1.9/Pipermail 0.09 on Debian/Ubuntu, running Plesk.

Chris