Emails automatically thread by subject, no matter how old or unrelated
To preface, I’m using the Crossbox mail client hosted by MXroute. I was directed to Dovecot support when I made my inquiry to the former’s developers.
Apparently, when you write an email subject that is verbatim to another, previously sent email, the two become linked in a conversation thread.
I could have an email from 1996 titled “Groceries” and if I make one today titled “Groceries” my inbox would have them connected as one long thread. I’m getting email threads in the 100s because of this.
Crossbox people have told me it’s not something they have control over. They mentioned it being a Dovecot problem. Has anyone encountered this?
It would be tremendously inconvenient to ensure that every email I ever send from now on has a unique subject so to as not have them threaded together. Let me be clear, email threading and conversation views are extremely useful. I just want them to be…relevant to the chain of emails that are being looked at.
Is there a way to group threads by unique header information? It is becoming borderline unusable to sift through invoices.
On Thu, 01 Feb 2024 01:49:16 -0000 wakod67943--- via dovecot dovecot@dovecot.org wrote:
To preface, I’m using the Crossbox mail client hosted by MXroute. I was directed to Dovecot support when I made my inquiry to the former’s developers.
Apparently, when you write an email subject that is verbatim to another, previously sent email, the two become linked in a conversation thread.
This is not done by dovecot. I just sent myself two test emails with the exact same subject, and they did not appear threaded.
The threading is controlled by specific headers: "References" and "In-Reply-To". If dovecot were to group the messages by subject, I would see one of those headers in the second email. They are not there.
My mail client has a setting called "Attract by subject" that enables the behaviour you describe. Check your settings. Perhaps Crossbox has something similar.
On 01/02/2024 03:49 EET wakod67943--- via dovecot dovecot@dovecot.org wrote:
To preface, I’m using the Crossbox mail client hosted by MXroute. I was directed to Dovecot support when I made my inquiry to the former’s developers.
Apparently, when you write an email subject that is verbatim to another, previously sent email, the two become linked in a conversation thread.
I could have an email from 1996 titled “Groceries” and if I make one today titled “Groceries” my inbox would have them connected as one long thread. I’m getting email threads in the 100s because of this.
Crossbox people have told me it’s not something they have control over. They mentioned it being a Dovecot problem. Has anyone encountered this?
It would be tremendously inconvenient to ensure that every email I ever send from now on has a unique subject so to as not have them threaded together. Let me be clear, email threading and conversation views are extremely useful. I just want them to be…relevant to the chain of emails that are being looked at.
Is there a way to group threads by unique header information? It is becoming borderline unusable to sift through invoices.
You could take a look at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5256 which explains two threading algoritms, ORDEREDSUBJECT and REFERENCES. ORDEREDSUBJECT is probably what you are using now, and REFERENCES is the one you'd want to use?
Aki
participants (3)
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Aki Tuomi
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Chad Wallace
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wakod67943＠flexvio.com