Building email threads from unix mailboxes

[Erik Max Francis]

Jed Parsons wrote:

> Is the References header a running list of all the In-Reply-To headers
> so far in the thread?

It depends on the service.  Some only keep a few of the last references,
some only one, some retain the full list from the very beginning (at
least as far as the RFC will allow).

Probably if you wanted to handle robust threading, you'd want to go by
In-Reply-To and References, backtracking manually (rather than relying
on any given References list to be complete), and then, for systems like
mail-to-news gateways which may break the In-Reply-To/References chain,
group by similar subjects posted around the same time.

-- 
 __ Erik Max Francis && max at alcyone.com && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
/  \ San Jose, CA, USA && 37 20 N 121 53 W && AIM erikmaxfrancis
\__/ Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
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