On Fri, 2005-07-08 at 13:21 +0200, Johannes Berg wrote:

If I understand the thread sorting algorithm correctly (from draft-ietf-imapext-sort-17.txt and the code), it will sort like this .. where threads are sorted by the newest child in them. Now, I am thinking that evolution simply uses dovecot's THREAD feature and doesn't implement anything itself, so that if I wanted to have that kind of threading, I'd have to implement it in dovecot. Would this be easy? I'm thinking that I should just treat all nodes as if they were dummy nodes in sort_root_nodes, but that only fixes the first level afaict, because later dates are not propagated up. Essentially, I think what the algorithm tb uses does is not use a nodes date as it's sorting criterion, but it's newest child, and apply this rule recursively.

Does anyone else think this feature would be useful? I regularly end up almost missing mail because it is sorted at such a low position and I don't see the thread at all..

Unfortunately Evolution sorts this way internally, otherwise I would have implemented that kind of better threading long time ago as an (RFC-breaking) option.

There have been some talk in past in IMAP mailinglists about adding some options to THREAD command to change its behavior in different ways. Would be nice, but not a very high priority for me..

Johannes Berg wrote:

Hi,

If I understand the thread sorting algorithm correctly (from draft-ietf-imapext-sort-17.txt and the code), it will sort like this (where I use numbers instead of dates with higher numbers being newer mails)

4 10 3 11 2 12 1 13

etc into all the lower levels. Thunderbird will actually sort this like this:

1 13 2 12 3 11 4 10

...

You're lucky.

I've just installed Dovecot on a Debian Sarge machine here and am seeing some very strange thread sorting.

In Thunderbird on both Fedora and Debian clients, my threads served up by Dovecot look like this:

|-11 | -12 |-2 |-3 |-4 | -5 | -6 | -7 | -8 |-1 -9 `-10

Where the exact same threads served by Sendmail/imap look like this:

|-1 |-2 |-3 |-4 | -5 | -6 | -7 | -8 |-9 | -10 |-11 | -12

Squirrelmail shows the threads correctly in both cases too, so I suspect there might be something funny going on with how Thunderbird handles Maildir threads. I notice that Dovecot doesn't support the THREAD=ORDEREDSUBJECT capability, might that have something to do with it?

thanks, Greg