1703548 - Older messages not threaded

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Alex Willis]

Attachment: Laptop TBird not threading older messages.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/89.0.4389.114 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Due to previous problems with calendar sync and peculiar behaviour with the conversations add-on, I decided to make a new profile on a spare computer, then copy it over when ready. But the only thing stopping me from using the new profile is that not all my messages are being threaded. On the old profile they are fine. I've gone through all the "thread" related settings in the Config Editor and changed some to match but it made not difference. Any ideas as to what else I could experiment with?

Actual results:

New profile on "laptop" not threading messages prior to 05/03/2021, but old slightly damaged profile on "desktop" computer does thread the same messages.

Expected results:

All messages with matching subject should be threaded.

Comment 1

[Alex Willis]

Attachment: Desktop TBird correct threading.png

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Alex Willis from comment #0)

...
I've gone through all the "thread" related settings in the Config Editor and changed some to match but it made not difference. Any ideas as to what else I could experiment with?

Please list the combos you tried.

Comment 3

[Alex Willis]

Attachment: Screenshot 2021-04-07 160530.png

The settings on the desktop computer different to standard are revealed by the config editor in bold. I changed all of these to the same on the laptop, but it made no difference.

One of the settings wasn't present on the laptop at all. Should I create this?
mailnews.database.global.views.global.columns

Comment 4

[Alfred Peters [:infofrommozilla]]

(In reply to Alex Willis from comment #0)

All messages with matching subject should be threaded.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Stop_threading_by_subject

If you want to stop all threading by Subject set mail.strict_threading true.

So you need to set this to false. In my experience, a TB restart is required. And even then, the pref only works on newly arriving email.

For already received mails at most a "Repair Folder" via the context menu helps.

Comment 5

[Alex Willis]

Strict threading was already set to false as you can see from a screenshot of my config editor above.

However, thanks for your tip on repairing the folder. This has fixed it. I find this odd that it was necessary as I had created a new profile very recently with the sole purpose of starting afresh with all my settings.