#575 new
Vincent Danen

Threading doesn't work with RT-based mails

Reported by Vincent Danen | January 9th, 2014 @ 05:39 PM

I use RT (from Best Practical: http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/ ) at work and Apple Mail threads ticket replies together, but MailMate does not. I'm not quite sure why; the folder these get filtered to (at the IMAP level) will thread duplicate messages together, but not followups.

So, for instance, a customer's initial email to our RT queue generates something like:

X-RT-Priority: 1
X-RT-Queue: the-queue
X-RT-SubQueue:
Subject: [foo.com #273288] some subject
From: "Requester via RT" the-queue@foo.com
In-Reply-To: 1389187500.15468.4.hello@there.com
References: RT-Ticket-273288@rt.foo.com
1389187500.15468.4.hello@there.com Message-ID: rt-4.0.13-25388-1389187503-721.273288-3-0@rt.foo.com
Precedence: bulk
X-RT-Loop-Prevention: rt.foo.com
RT-Ticket: rt.foo.com #273288
Managed-BY: RT 4.0.13 (http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/)
RT-Originator: requester@foo.com

and a reply (so me replying, in RT, which becomes part of the thread in Apple Mail but does not in MailMate):

X-RT-Priority: 1
X-RT-Queue: the-queue
X-RT-SubQueue:
X-RT-Owner: vincent@foo.com
Subject: [rt.foo.com #273288] some subject
From: "Vincent via RT" the-queue@redhat.com
In-Reply-To: 1389187500.15468.4.hello@there.com
References: RT-Ticket-273288@rt.foo.com
1389187500.15468.4.hello@there.com Message-ID: rt-4.0.13-3881-1389195320-1209.273288-4-0@rt.foo.com
Precedence: bulk
X-RT-Loop-Prevention: rt.foo.com
RT-Ticket: rt.foo.com #273288
Managed-BY: RT 4.0.13 (http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/)

Sorry I had to mangle the headers a bit just to get rid of any incriminating email/server info, but hopefully this is enough to demonstrate and/or craft some mails to demonstrate the issue.

Unfortunately I am not able to provide the actual emails themselves to demonstrate, but if required I could probably come up with something.

Comments and changes to this ticket

  • Vincent Danen

    Vincent Danen January 9th, 2014 @ 06:03 PM

    Oh, this is interesting. Now that I'm looking at it closer, for the ones that do appear threaded, what's happening is we get the actual message sent to the mailing list that RT sends to, and we also get it via RT (so we get two messages, one with a subject "Stuff" and the other with a subject "[rt.foo.com #123] Stuff").

    The original (non-RT, to mailman) message has:

    Message-Id: 1389187500.15468.4.hello@there.com

    The RT-received (so rewritten and then sent to mailman) has:

    In-Reply-To: 1389187500.15468.4.hello@there.com
    References: RT-Ticket-273288@rt.foo.com
    1389187500.15468.4.hello@there.com

    And then the RT-replied message has the same:

    In-Reply-To: 1389187500.15468.4.hello@there.com
    References: RT-Ticket-273288@rt.foo.com
    1389187500.15468.4.hello@there.com

    Other headers are obviously different, and the RT headers as noted in the initial comment are also present in the two RT mails. So basically it looks like:

    > Original Email
        RT-received Email
        RT-replied Email
    

    (Hopefully that renders ok, the ">" is illustrating the thread triangle. It shows that there is one level of depth here, that both RT messages are seen as replies to the original email. Apple Mail rendered it as:

      Original Email
    > RT-received Email
        RT-replied Email
    

    Hopefully that makes sense. Some other links that maybe describe the threading better:

    http://cr.yp.to/immhf/thread.html
    http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html

  • benny

    benny January 10th, 2014 @ 01:20 PM

    • State changed from “new” to “accepted”

    MailMate currently only shows strict relationships, i.e., parent-child. Two messages are threaded only if the one message refers to the “Message-ID” of the other message. Obviously that does not work well in the above. Even Apple Mail does not thread all 3 messages, because the subject lines are not identical (which are used by Apple Mail).

    I'm considering to offer an alternative threading mode based on subject. If I do then it could probably handle joining all 3 of these messages. I cannot give you a time frame on that though.

    I'll treat this ticket as a request for subject-based threading (or something better).

  • benny

    benny January 10th, 2014 @ 01:22 PM

    • State changed from “accepted” to “duplicate”

    This actually makes it a duplicate of thread #548.

  • Vincent Danen

    Vincent Danen January 10th, 2014 @ 03:42 PM

    Ok, great, thanks for that. I've set myself to watch the other ticket. Subject-based threading would be ok (and you're right, Apple Mail must do the same given the two "original" mails are not noted as being part of a thread, but are on the same "level". If you can implement the same kind of threading that mutt has, that would be fantastic... mutt does the best threading of any email client I've seen.

    http://www.mutt.org/doc/devel/manual.html#threads
    http://www.mutt.org/doc/devel/manual.html#strict-threads

    Just for some ideas.. =)

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