521633 - Unrelated messages are displayed in the same thread/conversation

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[hjp]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2 GTB6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.4pre) Gecko/20090915 Thunderbird/3.0b4

See attached screen shot. There are several threads (subject "Ersatzräume ...", the messages from "FIW", subject "[aconet-b] ..." and a few single messages grouped together into a thread.

The first message has both an In-Reply-To and a References header (the start of the thread is missing). The messages which are incorrectly linked into the thread have neither. They also don't have a similar subject or any other common characteristic which might be used by a heuristic. I don't have the slightest clue how this can happen.

How d


Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
I don't know how to reproduce it, but this isn't the only thread where this happened.

Comment 1

[hjp]

Attachment: Screenshot of a "mixed" thread

Comment 2

[hjp]

Oops. The paragraph starting with "How d" was supposed to read:

How does TB3 determine which messages form a thread? I noticed that it doesn't seem to use the subject any more (unlike TB2), but clearly there must be something else besides the Message-Id, In-Reply-To and References headers. Is the threading information cached somewhere?

Comment 3

[Martin Barry]

I'm seeing something similar with Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.8) Gecko/20100217 SUSE/3.0.2-5.1 Thunderbird/3.0.2

There is no relationship that I can see between two messages that end up threaded.

Parent headers:

From: ...
To: ...
Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2010 16:52:57 +0100
Subject: AW: Monday March 8th
Thread-Topic: Monday March 8th
Thread-Index: Acq5SQlXxtQHzx1WRjmjWFHx4372KwA10rLw
Message-ID:
 <AC7A7EC3A9F7194E9840063F563E4B2041D247920B@...>
References: <4B8BCAF9.3050100@...>
In-Reply-To: <4B8BCAF9.3050100@...>
Accept-Language: de-DE
Content-Language: de-DE
X-MS-Exchange-Organization-AuthAs: Internal
X-MS-Exchange-Organization-AuthMechanism: 04
X-MS-Exchange-Organization-AuthSource: ...
X-MS-Has-Attach:
X-MS-Exchange-Organization-SCL: -1
X-MS-TNEF-Correlator:
acceptlanguage: de-DE
x-pp-processed: __PP2__91e1ebe0-251a-45c4-922b-2497dda8f10e
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
MIME-Version: 1.0




Child headers:

From: ...
To: ...
Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2010 09:00:17 +0100
Subject: Alert: GigabitEthernet0/9 on swext2 has gone down
Thread-Topic: Alert: GigabitEthernet0/9 on swext2 has gone down
Thread-Index: Acq6p5I1rB6xY0DHS4WQqxZbep50WQ==
Message-ID: <4b8e1711.Js+Vq2YhJ+oB31sp%...@...>
Accept-Language: en-US, de-DE
Content-Language: en-US
X-MS-Exchange-Organization-AuthAs: Anonymous
X-MS-Exchange-Organization-AuthSource: ...
X-MS-Has-Attach:
X-MS-TNEF-Correlator:
user-agent: nail 11.25 7/29/05
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
MIME-Version: 1.0

Comment 4

[Martin Barry]

Forgot to add that my thread settings are the defaults.

mail.correct_threading;true
mail.strict_threading;true
mail.thread_without_re;false

Comment 5

[Martin Barry]

Each instance of these errors can be fixed by:

- stopping Thunderbird
- remove the offending MSF
- start Thunderbird and wait for the folder to be re-indexed

Comment 6

[richard_taylor01]

Confirmed Martin!

Suddenly discovered same problem.  Posts in several usenet groups before 13/10/11 have jumbled threads.
Followed your post and deleted "Sent.msf" after saving a copy.  Restarted TB and all appears well.

Comment 7

[Stefan Neufeind]

sometimes happens here as well, messages not related, no common "in-reply-to" or so

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Still see this problem?
Only with News ?

Comment 9

[Stefan Neufeind]

I still see this from time to time - with mails. Didn't find a common pattern or how to reproduce it. At some point I had the feeling it occured more often if mails from the sent-folder where moved somewhere (like into a folder with all customer-related mails). But even for that I couldn't really find a reproducible pattern.

Comment 10

[Charles]

Sorry, removed myself thinking I was added by mistake...

I don't remember the last time I saw this problem...

Comment 11

[Matt]

I think we need to establish, on a recent incident that the references headers are not the same. By far the vast majority of these types of threading issues are from folk that find an existing email and click reply then remove that which does not apply. They occasionally appear in support. But I have not had one that could not be explained in terms of settings since V3 I do not think. That is the preferences here. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Stop_threading_by_subject

Comment 12

[leonardo]

Attachment: Schermata 2021-04-21 alle 15.33.00.png

Hi,

i can confirm the problem.

Platform: MacOS Mojave (10.14.6)
Thunderbird version: 88.0b3 (64-bit)

In the attached screenshot you see my current situation. I have a unified folder, with 5 different mail accounts and 2 RSS subscriptions. The messages highlighted in blue should be in the same thread, as parent, child and grandchild. Instead, the newest message, received at 14:09, is shown as children of an RSS entry. The problem disappears when i choose a different folder, then choose again the unified inbox folder, or if i restart Thunderbird. When displayed again, the threads are ordered correctly.

I'm quite sure this was not the case before the introduction of unified folders. It happened to me ever since, for different Thunderbird versions and different platforms, with different configurations, thus it doesn't needs to be a folder with mixed mail accounts and/or RSS entries.

Comment 13

[leonardo]

Attachment: Schermata 2021-05-03 alle 22.16.52.png

I have also to report that, on very long and articulated discussions, the dotted line showing the tree branches can appear broken in several disconnected segments on the same depth level. I'm not sure how this could be possibile, but i presume because of the mismatching position of the messages in the list according to the references/in-reply-to headers.

Comment 14

[M Lopez-Ibanez]

Thunderbird version: 102.15.1

See also bug 1727169
See also bug 1796145

This bug is very noticeable when using the Conversations add-on but doesn't depend on it:
https://github.com/thunderbird-conversations/thunderbird-conversations/issues/2029
https://github.com/thunderbird-conversations/thunderbird-conversations/issues/1939

Comment 15

[[e-mail]]

Thunderbird version: 115.5.0

For 'some' emails, when invoking the context menu (right-click) and selecting 'Open Message in Conversation', a totally irrelevant conversation opens in a new tab.

Comment 16

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

This issue doesn't seem to be easily reproducible, it's very rare and bubbles up when using the Conversations add-on.
We're in the process of rebuilding our global message database which will hopefully get rid of all these problems. Closing this in favour of the work we're doing in bug 1572000.