[Virtualacorn-list] VirtualRPC for the Mac - MacPop beta release 1

Jeremy Nicoll - virtualacorn jn.ml.vac.83 at wingsandbeaks.org.uk
Sun Sep 14 00:14:02 BST 2008


Brian Carroll <briancarroll at f2s.com> wrote:
 
> Pluto allows many ways to display a  mail box; 4 of them are
> Threads-status, Threads-subject, Threads-score and Threads-latest.
> I use the 2nd. In effect the reader sorts first by subject and
> second connects the threads by using ... what?  The message ID
> is present in Aaron's pstings but appears not to be used.

I used to use Pluto.

Actually the effect is not as you say, as far as I remember.  I think Pluto
works out which mails are in which thread, then builds a structure
representing each thread.  It is then faced with the decision of how, when
the threads are each reduced to a single entry, to decide what order those
entries should be in.  So for example you can choose Threads-latest and see
the most recently updated threads at the top of a display.  But no matter
which of the 4 types of display you choose, once you expand the display of a
particular thread, it shows the same structure.
 
Each email has (or should have) a unique message-id.  An original post that
starst a thread only has that.  All the others also have a list of the
message-ids which are the parent, grandparent etc of the reply, and an
"In-reply-to" header which identifies the specific mail a user replied to.

Building the 'tree-structure' diagram for a thread is not as simple as you
might expect because a particular user does not necessarily have all the
intermediate mails on their machine at any one time (they mightn't have
downloaded them all, and may have deleted some of them). 

A very useful feature in Pluto is that you can detach a sub-tree of
mails/posts from the rest of a thread.  When the topic being discussed
changes, whether or not any of the people writing it changed their Subject
lines, the internal references/in-reply-to headers still show the
relationship between all the posts.  If you ask Pluto to detach part of that
you get two separate structures.  I used to do that a lot, and then revise
the Subjects in the hived-off sections to something that described what they
were really about.

-- 
Jeremy C B Nicoll - my opinions are my own.





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