[Dovecot] Manual thread breaking from Thunderbird

[Bill Cole]

At 1:41 PM +0200 5/7/08, rosenfield.albert at gmail.com wrote:
>Christian Jaeger wrote:
>>   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.
>
>Sounds like a great idea!

The IMAP extension that supports threading 
(http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-imapext-sort-20) has no 
support for clients 'breaking' threads. In fact, it does not 
explicitly or implicitly require that the IMAP server preserve any 
state about threading that cannot be reconstructed from the messages, 
but rather implies that an IMAP server rebuilds  the thread map from 
the messages for each THREAD command.

This means that if you want to break threads, it has to be entirely 
done in the client. Personally, I think that's where all threading 
belongs anyway.

I suppose one could also try to define a new IMAP threading extension 
or to convince Mark Crispin to make radical changes to the one he's 
been working on (and implementing in UW-IMAP) for 8 years, but I 
suspect that those approaches would be high-effort and low-yield.

>I'm curious though, how do convince your Thunderbird and Dovecot to
>work like Gmail and keep everything threaded in the same folder in the
>first place?

Dovecot isn't really a player in that question, which is really about 
how to make TBird do what you want it to do with messages and present 
them in a particular organizational style.


-- 
Bill Cole
bill at scconsult.com