newsgroup vs. mailing list

[Alex Rice]

On Oct 27, 2003, at 4:11 PM, Robert Brenstein wrote:

>
> Yes, the in-reply-to and references headers are needed to establish 
> parent-child relations but subject selection must be applied first.

The Subject: header does figure prominently in JWZ's threading 
algorithm. But you will see the first step in the algorithm is to make 
a tree of Container objects based on the References: header.

Somehow Apple's engineers have managed to make a threading algorithm 
that can deal with changed Subject lines and still maintain the topic 
thread. I am guessing it's the JWZ algorithm but don't know.

I am not advocating that people change Subject lines willy nilly 
though. Also I didn't realize until now that the "Re:" part of subjects 
is helpful in the threading algorithms too.

Alex Rice <alex at mindlube.com> | Mindlube Software | 
<http://mindlube.com>

what a waste of thumbs that are opposable
to make machines that are disposable  -Ani DiFranco