[Haskell] mailing list headaches

[Frederik Eaton]

Hi all,

I've been trying for some time to get threading to work properly on
this mailing list. The problem is that I don't want to thread by
subject in all of my folders, because then messages with short
subjects like "hi", "hey", etc., in my personal folders will end up
together. However, threading by "References", which RFC 2822 says
SHOULD be possible, and which works on my other folders, doesn't work
well on Haskell mailing lists. Presumably the issue is that there are
a large number of Windows users with strange mail clients which don't
insert "References" headers.

After some weeks of squinting, I've ended up settling with the
following partial solution in my configuration files (I use Mutt):

set strict_threads=yes
folder-hook folders/haskell set strict_threads=no
folder-hook folders/libraries set strict_threads=no
folder-hook folders/glasgow-haskell set strict_threads=no
folder-hook folders/glasgow-haskell-bugs set strict_threads=no

I thought I'd share this feature because a lot of people use Mutt and
it makes the Haskell mailing lists a bit easier to follow. It isn't
perfect, because threads organized by subject are only one layer deep
- you end up getting a list instead of a tree, except that since Mutt
uses References where possible it ends up being a list of trees, where
at the root of each tree is either a reply to the first message of the
thread, or someone with a non-conforming mail client.

Of course, another problem is the mailing list archives, which also
try to organize threads by "References" but fail on these lists:

http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/glasgow-haskell-users/2005-June/thread.html

Thus it seems the list archive software also requires fixing or
reconfiguration...

Frederik

-- 
http://ofb.net/~frederik/