Gmail is therefore in violation of the RFC5822. It's quite clear how it should work per the RFC appendix.
Well, no. Asterisks added for emphasis. This specification is intended as a definition of what message
content format is to be passed between systems. Though some message systems locally store messages in this format (which eliminates the need for translation between formats) and others use formats that differ from the one specified in this specification, local storage is outside of the scope of this specification.
Note: This specification is not intended to dictate the internal formats used by sites, the specific message system features that they are expected to support, *** or any of the characteristics of user interface programs that create or read messages. *** In addition, this document does not specify an encoding of the characters for either transport or storage; that is, it does not specify the number of bits used or how those bits are specifically transferred over the wire or stored on disk.
5822 defines the structure and syntax of the data. Not how mail agents should work with it.
On Sun, Jan 14, 2024 at 3:55 AM Bryan Fields <Bryan@bryanfields.net> wrote:
On 1/14/24 1:01 AM, William Herrin wrote:
Respectfully, your MUA is not the only MUA. Others work differently.
Bill, I use multiple MUA's, among them Thunderbird, mutt, kmail and even the zimbra web interface. All follow and implement RFC5822 as it pertains to threading.
Note, threading works fine in the list archives too, but only displays two levels deep.
GMail, for example, follows the message IDs as you say but assumes that if you change the subject line in your reply (more than adding "Re:") then you intend to start a new thread from that point in the discussion. It groups messages accordingly.
Gmail is therefore in violation of the RFC5822. It's quite clear how it should work per the RFC appendix.
This is not an unreasonable expectation: if you merely want to continue the current conversation without going off on a new tangent then there's no need for a different subject line.
I think it's quite unreasonable to expect others to compensate for an MUA which doesn't implement 25+ year old standards properly. -- Bryan Fields
727-409-1194 - Voice http://bryanfields.net