[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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