[Email-SIG] API for email threading library?

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Bill Janssen writes:

 > So, stripping double-quotes on the left side stays, stripping brackets
 > on the right side is a no-no.

Hrm.  How about interpreting quoted-pairs?  (Not that you should ever
see them, but ....)

That is, <"b\l\o\op"@grok.this> and <"bloop"@grok.this> should compare
equal, no?  Or yes?

Which leads me to ... I wonder if the way the Postel Principle applies
here isn't "you're better unifying too many message IDs because the
user will immediately recognize thread content skew, while unifying
too few will result in different parts of the thread being widely
separated in the presentation of the message set, and possibly
premature ejaculation of responses".[1]  So, (without having thought
about it *too* much<wink/>) I would advocate unifying message IDs that
are likely to be (mistakenly?) "normalized" by some implementations.

And of course, you should never see such message IDs in practice; I
don't think I've ever seen a mailbox, let alone the LHS of a message
ID, in quotes outside of an RFC.<wink/>  Although I *have* seen whole
addresses in quotes.

BTW, although I'm working with VM myself, my intent is to make
jwz-thread.el usable with any Emacsen-based MUA.  (I'm really sick of
how crappy *all* of the MUA code is in Emacs -- I can understand why
one would use MH-E since the MUA is actually implemented elsewhere!)

Footnotes: 
[1]  Which is why I'm implementing a threading engine....