714292 - Selecting a Prior Newsgroup Message in the Header of a Reply Fails

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Networking: NNTP, defect)

Description

[David E. Ross]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:9.0) Gecko/20111222 Thunderbird/9.0.1

In a threaded newsgroup discussion, the header area contains a References section.  This shows the chain of threading back from the current message to the original message in the thread.  Generally, this is indicated by numbers except for the immediately prior message, which is indicated by a message ID.  In the message source, all of the items are message IDs.  

If at some point, a message is cross-posted to a different newsgroup on the same server with "Followup to" that newer newsgroup, selecting an item from the References will fail unless the original newsgroup is subscribed.  

I found this in the following situation.  I am subscribed to mozilla.general and mozilla.support.thunderbird but not to mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird.  The message <news://news.mozilla.org:119/[e-mail]> appeared in mozilla.general.  It was a reply to a prior message in mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird.  I selected the References item for the immediately prior message and got an error popup saying:
"Message for message-id <[e-mail]> not found".  To resolve this, I had to subscribe to mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird and download a large number of prior headers.  

Since the References items do include the message IDs, Thunderbird should retrieve the indicated message as long as it is on the same server.