On 05/04/2025 05:01, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
On Fri, Apr 04, 2025 at 10:22:47AM +0700, Max Nikulin wrote:
Again when reading mail, if subject is changed almost completely: "Old" to
"New (was: Old)" to "New" with "(was: ...)" stripped by e.g. Thunderbird or
Emacs; then the thread is split into 3 conversations, threading headers are
not respected.
Bother - is that the fault of the MUA?
I do not think Thunderbird and GNUS do a wrong thing stripping "(was:
...)" part. (Perhaps they may add a button to restore original variant.
I have in mind something similar to forgotten attachment warning in
Thunderbird.) I believe that it is Gmail fault that "New" is split from
"New (was: Old)". I admit that it is not well known aspect that "(was:
...)" is treated in a special way by some mailers.
It is not bad per se that thread is split in some cases. However it
would be better to have cross links between both parts to switch to the
counterpart and "undo" button to override heuristics.
"Solved" is never removed from subject, making it close to useless if the
message caused continuation of discussion. In this sense messengers and web
forums with their likes and thanks may be better to mark useful messages in
long threads.
This is the real problem: threads here go on for months and years.
Perhaps MUA should strip "solved" subject prefix or suffix from reply
(offering user to restore it) similar to "(was: ...)" part. I expect
that in Thunderbird it may be done by an add-on.
(As a side note: The web interface does benefit from [SOLVED] as being visible.
I do not mind that it is useful. It may be recommended to users of mail
application that do not break threads behind the scene. Unfortunately
additional suggestion to remove "solved", if they are going to continue
thread, will be mostly ignored.
P.S. Ideally, "solved" is state of the original question that should
expressed as a link to the solution. Actual state may be changed after
both messages have been sent. I can imagine an additional HTTP service
that allows users to add marks like "solved" an to vote for useful
messages without SMTP noise. This extended state would be visible in web
archive and through MUA plugins. Subscribers who do not want to deal
with new fancy features would continue to use mailing lists in the
traditional way.
P.P.S. I hope, thread splitting heuristics will be drastically improved
in coming years by large language models running on both sides: sender
and recipient. More powerful tools will be able to distill archived
threads to provide summary with links to useful messages.
