812136 - Change the In-Reply-To: header of a received message so that it will appear in the right thread

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[Peter Flynn]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/537.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/23.0.1271.64 Safari/537.11

Steps to reproduce:

Untrained or careless users, or users of low-grade clients, often end up sending a new message when they should have replied to the original. Possibly some clients do not generate an In-Reply-To: header. Sometimes the Subject does have the right Re: value, but it still appears in a new thread.


Actual results:

Messages are not threaded as they ought to be.


Expected results:

I suggest a new feature to allow a user to force a message to be threaded into an existing thread. I don't like the idea of messing with the headers like this, but the prevalence of poorly-created messages has now become so great that it is no longer meaningful to get back to each sender and remind them to use Reply (any many of them may be using clients which fail to create the right header). In any event, this would not fix the disconnectedness of a message already received.

Comment 1

[Johannes]

As a workaround I'm currently using https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/header-tools-improved/ to correct In-Reply-To and or References headers in received emails to get threading right.