Martin wrote: > Currently I am trying to get used to Python's imaplib and email > modules. > I'like to create a webmail client simmilar to GMail.
This is off-topic, but why on earth would you want to emulate Gmail's conversation views? It's horrible and a very broken way of viewing e-mail threads. Compared the normal, threaded view of, say the discussions on this list to the view that Gmail gives you. For conversations of more than half a dozen posts, Gmail's view is unnavigatable. Suppose I want to break into a discussion that's already dozens of posts long. With a real threaded view I can easily see the flow of the conversation, grab random posts, then maybe read their parent or grandparent posts. Looking at the rest of your e-mail, I can see that maybe you do want to have real threads rather than the google conversation view which removes all structure. > > My Questions: > a) Is there any feature hidden in Python's built-in modules (imaplib, > email) that already can group all my mails into threads? Each e-mail has a referral number that refers to the parent email. Just keep track of these in a structure and you can easily build a nice tree of the thread. > > b) If not a... what would be the best way to implement this? > > I can think of two approaches: > b.1) Use the "References:" field of the messages in order to find out > which messages are related to each other. Yes. This is absolutely the right way to do it. > > I tried a first implementation which works quite well but I don't know > if there can occur situations where one message is related to two > parents. Also I don't know what happens if someone is too lazy to type > my address. He might click at "Reply", delete topic and old mail-text > and compose a new mail. Theoretically his mail client would set the > "References:" field accordingly never the less, wouldn't it? Therefore > my mail client would consider that completely new mail as part of an > older conversation. In this case, a lazy user is a lazy user. Probably best to encourage people to use better etiquette when using e-mail. > > The thoughts above might lead to the second approach: > > b.2) Use the "Subject:" field of the messages. Horribly broken. Thunderbird does this and it drives me crazy. I often get messages months apart that happen to have a common subject line, even though they aren't the same thread or conversation. I don't want a new message, which does not refer to the old message in any way, to attach itself to my 6-month old message and force me to scroll down through potentially hundreds of e-mails to find the stupid thing. No, the RFCs are there for a reason. They bring sanity to the chaos. Anything else is madness. And the fact the Outlook doesn't do proper referral fields just infuriates me. Sigh. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
