[Dovecot] Manual thread breaking from Thunderbird

[Christian Jaeger]

Hello

I'm looking for a way to manually break threads apart when independent 
threads are mixed up, mostly by users which aren't aware that they 
should not be replying to existing threads when starting a new one.

Since Thunderbird afaik does the threading itself, it would require a 
solution that actually changes the In-Reply-To header (and maybe also 
that other (non-standard?) header which is being sent by the M$ 
clients). For me modifying the actual emails on disk would be fine, i.e. 
renaming the In-Reply-To header to Old-In-Reply-To and such. (I'd 
actually *prefer* a solution that modifies the server side store, as 
opposed to one which keeps that info on the client side only like mutt 
seems to be doing.)

Is there a way to do this already? Seems like a task for a dovecot 
plugin--or for the xexec plugin and an external perl script or some such?

For triggering the renaming, a hacky solution could be to misuse labels 
(e.g. marking a message starred and "Later" and "Important" at the same 
time would trigger the modification and remove the labels).

When implementing such a thing: maybe also offer a way to modify 
subjects (for those cases where people are using short meaningless and 
recurring subjects--to both help breaking up the ensuing threading as 
well as giving them a useful replacement), maybe as an IMAP extension or 
such (to be used by Thunderbird plugins (?), or by web apps).

(I can code in C and Perl, but don't generally have much time.)

Christian.