[dev] IMAP thread pet peeve

[Kevin Myer]

Quoting Michael M Slusarz <slusarz at mail.curecanti.org>:

> Having to download all headers from all messages in the mailbox + doing
> all the sorting in non-compiled PHP code (vs. more likely faster
> compiled code on the server) = way too much overhead to justify the few
> cases where the threading doesn't work as expected.

It happens at least a dozen times a day for me (which is 12 times too 
many :D Try reading the Horde CVS commits mailing list with thread 
mode, for example...
Would it be a pain to implement a per folder sorting preference?  So I could
sort CVS commits by date (which I want) and my INBOX and other
discussion-oriented mailing lists by thread (which still fails too many times
but I can live with it)?

> thunderbird/mozilla can get away with doing this kind of sorting since
> 1) this sorting is being done on a user's computer where all CPU power
> is most likely "owned" by a single user and 2) these programs can cache
> these results for the entire time the program is over.  IMP would have
> to carry around *alot* of extra information in the session to be able
> to replicate this.

And from what I've read in bug reports and user experiences, the 
caches/indices
become corrupted fairly often too, so at least I don't have that problem with
IMP.  I'm just trying to come up with a better and more accurate threading
mechanism.  There's just no way that a thread in my INBOX, that starts with a
message I received ten minutes ago about "Address books" and ends with a
response from someone I forwarded the message to, should include a message I
received on 3/30/2005 that was a response to a message called "Address books",
and was prefaced by [Beta Report].  REFERENCES is better than ORDEREREDSUBJECT
but still breaks far too often for me.

Kevin
-- 
Kevin M. Myer
Senior Systems Administrator
Lancaster-Lebanon Intermediate Unit 13  http://www.iu13.org