At 3:22 PM +0900 2004-10-04, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
"Brad" == Brad Knowles <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Brad> You could spend a trillion dollars on this problem and Brad> not find a solution. The entire computer industry has been Brad> working on AI since the early 1960s, and they haven't solve Brad> it yet, and don't appear to be much closer today than they Brad> were back then.
That's a bit pessimistic, don't you think? What can be done without I-R-T or References doesn't require AI. Plenty of MUAs solve the problem of threading messages with no I-R-T header satisfactorily (ie, messages that are in the same thread almost always appear within a few lines of each other in the summary).
I don't think I'm being pessimistic here. I think I'm being realistic. There are no deterministic ways to figure out precisely which message is being replied to and which other messages are being referenced, unless you can guarantee that you can perfectly parse all possible quoting methods, and you can guarantee that you will always have enough information available in the quote to guarantee that you can determine which message is which.
Unfortunately, in the real world, you can't guarantee any of those things.
On the other hand, an archiver (such as Pipermail, distributed with Mailman, or MHonArc, a popular third-party archiver) does (typically) have that information, at least in "rebuild-the-whole-shebang" mode, and I would say that you should look at archivers, not at Mailman proper. Also look in the mailman FAQ for how to use a 3rd-party archiver with Mailman; you can probably find one that does a better job than Pipermail does. MHonArc would be a good bet.
In terms of re-creating threading data that was destroyed by an the MUA? No, I don't think that you're going to find much here.
http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html describes a threading algorithm that is fairly robust to this problem in my limited experience with it
Right, and as complex as this algorithm is, it still requires "In-Reply-To:" and "References:" headers in order to be able to do it's job.
That's as far as I'm willing to go though. Really, you should get your users to switch to an MUA that can handle headers that were standardized in 1975 or so. And there are plenty of MUAs that can do something sane about pseudo-threading messages without I-R-T.
Now there's a statement that I can agree with.
-- Brad Knowles, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755SAGE member since 1995. See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info. _______________________________________________ Mailman-Developers mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-developers/archive%40jab.org
