Mailody/Joomla/Debian
This weekend I sat down and created threads for Mailody. It’s something I missed since I switched from KMail as primary mail client. When a discussion goes forward and back a couple of times, by different people it is hard to follow when you do not have threads. I was surprised how much I missed them. I’ll probably do a release later this week of Mailody, not sure if this feature will be in that release though.
The website is made by Marijke Verkaik. It is made with a Joomla CMS. It was a while back that I last worked with Joomla, and I must say it has improved a lot – or I have of course. ;-) Marijke is gathering all links to Joomla related stuff on a page from the famous dutch Startpagina series. But as it contains mostly links, its usable for everyone: joomla.startpagina.nl.
Talkin about usable; I needed an update for ClamAV for one of my customers, and as that is not in a repository where there are security updates, I always struggled a bit to keep it up to date while wanting to stay on Debian Stable. Friday I found http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-volatile/. It exists already for a while but I have not heard of it before, but it’s a valuable repository.
If you do threads on your mail client, please please do threading by subject. It is very simple to do, follows the logics of the conversation and still, my patch for this in kmail was rejected in 1999 when I did it.
Threading by subject:
- mail with the same subject (if you stripped Re: Fwd: and other prefixes) are grouped in the same thread
- inside the thread, the mails are sorted by date
For many reasons, I find this a lot better than complete threading:
- when somebody changes the subject, it means that a new topic is started, and the messages should belong to a new thread instead of being included into the original message thread.
- if you kill the first message of a thread to which lot of people answered, you get several threads although there is still only one topic
- some people reply on mails eventhough they are starting a new thread. Yes, they are wrong, but a mail client should still take this into account. With threading by subject, this will be taken into a new thread.
For now I will not do that. The main reason behind it is that I think that there is an official way of doing it with message-ids and in-reply-to headers. For now that works quite well, although webclients like Yahoo seem to break threads.
If I do the threading by subject, I fear it will be slower then it is now ( I will need an extra level of checking) and I will need to accept bugs about not threading correctly. And I think there will be a lot of corner cases in that area.