4 ms·

Look at that, it had threaded email conversations back then. Apple still can't get that on to work consistently (show both messages sent to you and your own rep

Look at that, it had threaded email conversations back then. Apple still can't get that on to work consistently (show both messages sent to you and your own replies in one thread) across OS X/iOS Mail and icloud.com. It only works in OS X Mail (after you change settings), but not the other two.

scholia 13y ago
We had proper threaded email - far better than Gmail has today -- in the 1980s. Look, for example, at email in Ameol, written for the CoSy-based Cix conferencing system.
songgao 13y ago
Threading not working properly is a result of some email clients not implementing the standard properly. RFC 2822 [0] has clear definition on threading using In-Reply-To and References fields. Its precedent RFC 822 [1] had definition on In-Reply-To field. However, not all email client implement this feature properly. As a result, there a lot of "conversational" messages flying around without proper In-Reply-To field. To solve this, Gmail builds threading trees not only based on In-Reply-To and References fields, but also heuristically based on the subject line of emails. Outlook, on the other hand, ignores In-Reply-To and References fields and groups messages into threads solely based on subject lines (according to last time I checked). And then, allowing (or requiring) emails to have similar subject lines to be properly threaded implicitly means it's OK for those client that don't produce proper In-Reply-To/References fields to continue doing so. Therefore, for any email client to properly thread all types of messages, it has to implement subject line based threading too. Things would be much easier if everybody had faithfully implemented the standard. [0] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2822.txt http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2822.txt [1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc822.txt http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc822.txt EDIT: added RFC links
- atmosx 13y ago
  Yes, I still remember discussions about email clients with this FreeBSD core developer trying to convince us at the time that Mutt is better than any graphical client, especially because of the way it handles threads. To me at the time were empty words, why on earth I would wanna use a terminal-client in an HTML5 world? Well now that Mail.app started giving me the creeps after the volume of email increased, I'm slowly reconsidering... And although will be a steep learning curve, I'm seriously thinking of switching to mutt...
  - songgao 13y ago
    I did this about a month ago and am still using it. mutt is the only thing that 1) I feel comfortable with; and 2) works with GPGTools. Airmail would make a good alternative if it supported GPGTools :-(
    - atmosx 13y ago
      I'm waiting for Mailpile[1] too. [1] https://www.mailpile.is/ https://www.mailpile.is/
- smackfu 13y ago
  http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html

scholia 13y ago

We had proper threaded email - far better than Gmail has today -- in the 1980s. Look, for example, at email in Ameol, written for the CoSy-based Cix conferencing system.

songgao 13y ago

Threading not working properly is a result of some email clients not implementing the standard properly. RFC 2822 [0] has clear definition on threading using In-Reply-To and References fields. Its precedent RFC 822 [1] had definition on In-Reply-To field. However, not all email client implement this feature properly. As a result, there a lot of "conversational" messages flying around without proper In-Reply-To field. To solve this, Gmail builds threading trees not only based on In-Reply-To and References fields, but also heuristically based on the subject line of emails. Outlook, on the other hand, ignores In-Reply-To and References fields and groups messages into threads solely based on subject lines (according to last time I checked). And then, allowing (or requiring) emails to have similar subject lines to be properly threaded implicitly means it's OK for those client that don't produce proper In-Reply-To/References fields to continue doing so. Therefore, for any email client to properly thread all types of messages, it has to implement subject line based threading too. Things would be much easier if everybody had faithfully implemented the standard. [0] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2822.txt http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2822.txt [1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc822.txt http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc822.txt EDIT: added RFC links

atmosx 13y ago
Yes, I still remember discussions about email clients with this FreeBSD core developer trying to convince us at the time that Mutt is better than any graphical client, especially because of the way it handles threads. To me at the time were empty words, why on earth I would wanna use a terminal-client in an HTML5 world? Well now that Mail.app started giving me the creeps after the volume of email increased, I'm slowly reconsidering... And although will be a steep learning curve, I'm seriously thinking of switching to mutt...
- songgao 13y ago
  I did this about a month ago and am still using it. mutt is the only thing that 1) I feel comfortable with; and 2) works with GPGTools. Airmail would make a good alternative if it supported GPGTools :-(
  - atmosx 13y ago
    I'm waiting for Mailpile[1] too. [1] https://www.mailpile.is/ https://www.mailpile.is/
smackfu 13y ago
http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html