[Mailman-Developers] Doubt regarding threads

[Aanand Shekhar Roy]

> After enough exchanges, the reference line will get too long, and then
> the proper (per the RFC) procedure is to drop the oldest reference. (For
> threading to work in the MUA, it only needs the last couple to find the
> latest message that has been received and thread under it)
>
> There is also the fact that some MUAs will only reference the message it
> is a direct reply to with a Reply-To header and not process References
> at all.
>
What we can do, instead of having subject header for thread, we can look
upto in-reply-to header , if the msg has no in-reply-to header then we can
assume it as a starting thread, otherwise it is a part of some thread. So
the database 1 from which we were calculating count of posts on particular
thread will now look like:
User_Id | Msg_Id | Thread_Id | Count
here, if the in-reply-to header of user B is msg-id of any existing entry
in database1, then he is a part of that conversation.
By this, the user can't bypass the throttling system by causing minor
changes in the subject. Also, even if he try to change the Subject then
also it will fall under the same thread, because of the in-reply-to
header.
> There is also the problem of people just starting a new message with out
> using reply (or a digest user replying to the digest) which will place
> the message in a new thread.
Yes, thats a problem, but I'm all idea'd out on how to work this out. I
even asked Hyperkitty developer
>
> This is why I made the comment that "per thread" limits really need to
> be combined with some form of over-all limit or new-thread limit to
> minimize the ability to "game" the system.
>
> --
> Richard Damon
>
>