Threading in Thunderbird and Mail
Ronald, a Hawk Wings reader, sent me some screenshots of the message threading in Thunderbird and Mail.app.
I knew that both email clients can thread messages, but I had never twigged how much more elegantly it is done in Thunderbird.
As you can see from the following images, Thunderbird is able to nest replies within replies, something that Mail is not able to do:
Ronald was hoping that I knew of a plugin for Mark.app which would emulate the smarter threading. I don’t know of one and I expect that developing one would be a lot of work.
Nonetheless, I am posting these shots partly for their own value (why isn’t Mail better at this?) and partly on the off-chance that someone knows of a plugin or tweak that I don’t know about.
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Tags: Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips, mail.app, messages, plugins, threading, thunderbird
August 18th, 2006 at 11:36 pm
Can ThunderBird to MailTags or something similar?
August 18th, 2006 at 11:49 pm
There are some tagging extensions for Thunderbird (“Tag the Bird” is one, I think), but I don’t know how well developed they are.
August 19th, 2006 at 12:25 am
the document of how to implement smarter threading can be found here :
http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html
August 19th, 2006 at 1:52 am
You obviously have not used threads in Thunderbird too long. What Mail does that Thunderbird does NOT do is that threads are sorted by the date of the latest reply in the thread – so threads pop to the top of your inbox. In Thunderbird the thread remains sorted by the date of the original email, so you have to fish around looking for what thread is bold and has an unread reply. The other thing is that Thunderbirds new mail count goes wacky if you use threads – just wait a bit and you should see what I mean :)
August 19th, 2006 at 2:36 am
That’s the behavior that “jwz algorithm” describes. But the algorithm can be adjusted to make appear at top of the mailbox threads that have recent replies.
August 19th, 2006 at 2:37 am
Well please let me know how to adjust the algorithm then :)
August 19th, 2006 at 3:05 am
You can do this if you are developing a mail application :)
Just propagate the date of the youngest message to the parent before sorting the sibling messages instead of sorting using the description in :
http://www.jwz.org/doc/draft-ietf-imapext-thread-12.txt
August 19th, 2006 at 5:15 pm
Hopefully Mail in Leopard will support IMAP server threading capabilities.
August 22nd, 2006 at 10:12 pm
Well, this threading thing is not server side. if you look at the extended headers or pure source of a mail in reply to any other one, you’ll notice tags like this:
References:
In-Reply-To:
You would just have to sort these mails like a tree …
@JT
Talking about sorting: (have to guess the names, since I use the german version )
Thunderbird ‘View’ -> ‘Sort by’ -> ‘Date’
Thunderbird ‘View’ -> ‘Sort by’ -> ‘Descending’
Thunderbird ‘View’ -> ‘Sort by’ -> ‘Group by Thread’
This way, the most current thread is listed above all others :-)
You can also sort by ‘Read/Unread’, but this doesn’t properly include the partly read threads :-/
August 23rd, 2006 at 4:15 am
Hoa,
Current version of the internet draft you linked to (which now includes the SORT extension):
INTERNET MESSAGE ACCESS PROTOCOL – SORT AND THREAD EXTENSIONS
Ronald,
Not sure which “this” you’re referring to but IMAP clients can take advantage of server-based threading capabilities. Apple Mail currently doesn’t, Mulberry does, Thunderbird might (I’ve never used it).
May 24th, 2010 at 4:57 pm
Well, it’s been almost four years since the last reply, but it seems that Mail *still* can’t nest threads in the way that Thunderbird can. It has been infuriating me lately! It makes long threads much more difficult to read. Please reply if you know how any way of making Mail imitate Thunderbird in this regard :)