I’m a bit flummoxed by the way MailMate handles message threads. I
have read many (but not all) of the messages in the [MailMate Mail
Archive](https://www.mail-archive.com/mailmate%40lists.freron.com/) that
I can find with a search on “organize by thread”, but I haven’t
found an answer to my question.
To set the stage, here’s a simple use case:
Over the course of four days, I received four messages that, to me,
constitute a single thread:
1. On 2018-02-06, X sent Y a message with the subject “foo bar” and
copied (cc) me.
2. On 2018-02-07, Y replied-all to X; subject=“Re: foo bar”.
3. On 2018-02-08, X replied-all to Y; subject=“Re: foo bar”.
4. On 2018-02-09, X sent a second reply-all to Y’s 2018-02-07 message;
subject=“Re: foo bar”.
If I select any one of these messages in my inbox and click the
“Thread” toolbar button, MM does what I expect and displays this
(assuming, of course, that I’m sorting by date in ascending order):
| From | To | Subject | Date | Msg ID |
|------|----|-------------|------------|--------|
| X | Y | foo bar | 2018-02-06 | 5597 |
| Y | X | Re: foo bar | 2018-02-07 | 6414 |
| X | Y | Re: foo bar | 2018-02-08 | 6137 |
| X | Y | Re: foo bar | 2018-02-09 | 6321 |
On the other hand, if, rather than clicking the “Thread” toolbar
button, I enable View > “Organize by Thread”, I see two distinct
pairs of messages, separated by other messages:
| From | To | Subject | Date | Msg
ID |
|---------------------------------|----|-------------|------------|--------|
| ▼X | Y | foo bar | 2018-02-06 |
5597 |
| Y | X | Re: foo bar | 2018-02-07 | 6414
|
and
| From | To | Subject | Date | Msg
ID |
|---------------------------------|----|-------------|------------|--------|
| ▼X | Y | Re: foo bar | 2018-02-08 |
6137 |
| X | Y | Re: foo bar | 2018-02-09 | 6321
|
I don’t understand why View > “Organize by Thread” does not group
all four messages together in the same way that clicking the
“Thread” toolbar button does. Can anyone explain that behavior? As
you can see, I have included the message IDs here, and I note that they
do not increase monotonically in chronological order (as I would have
predicted). That suggests that message ID could play some role and that
MM assigns message IDs in some fashion that isn’t obvious to me. It
also seems like Benny’s statement, “[MailMate uses very strict
threading. It only shows two messages as related if they are
parent-child.](https://www.mail-archive.com/mailmate@lists.freron.com/msg01927.html)”
may apply here, though neither my message ID hypothesis nor “very
strict threading” explain the discrepancy in the two options for
viewing message threads.
On a related note, I would like to register another vote in favor of
Scott’s [Feature request - highlighting related messages in a
thread](https://www.mail-archive.com/mailmate@lists.freron.com/msg02687.html).
Cheers,
/topher
P.S. Apologies if my markdown tables don’t translate well.
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