604330 - Include forwarded messages in conversation view

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 583587

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, enhancement)

Description

[Lorenz Froihofer]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.10) Gecko/20100914 Firefox/3.6.10 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: 

Assume you have an e-mail conversation with person A and at some point in time, you forward a message out of that conversation to person B. This forward is semantically related to the initial conversation with A. If now B starts a conversation based on the forwarded message, we have one semantical conversation. Unfortunately, the conversation view is broken at the time you forward a message and you have to search for the two separate conversations

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Send an email
2. Reply to that email
3. Forward the reply
4. Reply to the forwarded message
Actual Results:  
Messages 1,2 are one conversation.
Messages 3,4 are another conversation.

Expected Results:  
Messages 1-4 should be a single conversation.

If you forward an e-mail message, the composed e-mail does not contain any reference to the message ID of the forwarded message. Therefore, this prevents forwarded messages from being included in the conversation view.

The "References:" header field seems to be appropriate according to RFC 822, "The contents of this field identify other  correspondence which  this message references.  Note that if message identifiers are used, they must use the msg-id specification format."

According to the current RFC 5322, the "References:" header should be used when replying to a message, but the standard does not exclude it to be used in other cases.

I don't know the code, but setting the "References:" header might be the solution to that issue.

Alternatively, one could use a custom "X-Forwards:" header referring to the forwarded message and respect this header when creating the conversation view. This, however, seems to be only the second choice.

Comment 1

[Jonathan Protzenko [:protz]]

This is fixed already in newer nightlies. Of course, this will only take effect for messages you forward from then on. Thanks for your detailed bug report!

I'm unsure what you're talking about when you say "conversation view". If it's the "show in conversation" feature, then yes, it will contain your forwarded message and the subsequent conversation as well.