On 05/03/2012 06:07 AM, Tobias Pankrath wrote:

Does the D newsgroup have broken threading in mutt? In my client
threading breaks often because some answers starts new thread
etc. makes the hole thing useless.

The broken threading is caused by the Mailman newsgroup to mailing list gateway, as described in this post: http://forum.dlang.org/post/[email protected]

I was looking briefly at this issue recently, as it was getting annoying to follow the large threads in my newsreader, and it seems to me that the Mailman stance of changing the Message-ID is wrong. They claim they are just trying to follow the RFCs by generating their own unique ID, but reading RFC 2822 makes it clear that they are misguided:

"The uniqueness of the message identifier is guaranteed by the host that generates it (see below)."

My comment: In other words, they shouldn't be assuming responsibility for this.

"Note: There are many instances when messages are "changed", but those changes do not constitute a new instantiation of that message, and therefore the message would not get a new message identifier. [..] The addition of such header fields does not change the identity of the message and therefore the original "Message-ID:" field is retained. In all cases, it is the meaning that the sender of the message wishes to convey (i.e., whether this is the same message or a different message) that determines whether or not the "Message-ID:" field changes, not any particular syntactic difference that appears (or does not appear) in the message."

My comment: Making the intention of the Message-ID clear, and in fact by generating a new one they are working against its purpose.

I found two Mailman bug reports with patches regarding this issue:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman/+bug/266263
https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman/+bug/496233

I may or may not follow up on this with the Mailman folks. If somebody else wants to feel free.

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