721549 - Bugmail No Longer Threads in Gmail

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(bugzilla.mozilla.org :: General, defect)

Description

[Tanay Gavankar [:tgavankar]]

It seems like ever since early January (around 1/2/2012), Bugzilla emails that are sent/forwarded to gmail no longer thread correctly. Inspecting the headers, there seemed to be some changes in Message-ID as well as others.

Here are 5 emails I have that are of the same bug, the first of which is the "New:" email (not threaded, as it used to as the subject is different), next two update emails are threaded together (correctly, as expected), and the final two are not threaded with anything.

New: http://pastebin.mozilla.org/1463491
Threaded 1: http://pastebin.mozilla.org/1463492
Threaded 2: http://pastebin.mozilla.org/1463493
Unthreaded 3: http://pastebin.mozilla.org/1463494
Unthreaded 4: http://pastebin.mozilla.org/1463495


This seems like a common issue that multiple users who have bugmail forwarded to Gmail have experienced.

Comment 1

[:glob ✱]

i can't see any bugzilla changes that would have touched on mail at around that time.
one telling difference is that's when zimbra was updated.

justdave: any ideas here?

threading in gmail has always been weird -- it doesn't seem to honour the same headers which most other email client use for threading.

Comment 2

[:glob ✱]

there's a yammer thread about this, and there's a lot of WFMs on there.

mossop has indicated this is broken for him:

<glob> Mossop, does any bugmail thread?
<Mossop> Doesn't seem to for me
<glob> Mossop, even for bugs filed after early jan?
<Mossop> I don't think any bugmail I received since it first started happening has threaded


the relevant headers from a working email tgavankar referenced are:

Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
In-Reply-To: <[e-mail]/>
X-Mailer: Zimbra 6.0.8_GA_2661

and currently:

Message-ID: <[e-mail]/>
In-Reply-To: <[e-mail]/>
X-Mailer: Zimbra 7.1.3_GA_3374


looks like old zimbra was always overriding the message-id, which new zimbra no longer does.


tgavankar, are you able to provide the message-id and in-reply-to headers for bugmail from recent bugs, rather than one which straddles the working/broken boundary?

Comment 3

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

Looking in my gmail bin I see bugmail stopped threading on 31st December for me, indeed the last to thread I received at 5am and it came from the old zimbra and the next that should have threaded but didn't came at 9am through the new zimbra.

Comment 4

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

Perhaps helpful, mail from tryserver still threads ok, they have no Message-ID in their headers.

Comment 5

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

(In reply to Dave Townsend (:Mossop) from comment #4)
> Perhaps helpful, mail from tryserver still threads ok, they have no
> Message-ID in their headers.

Oops I lied, they have one too

Comment 6

[:glob ✱]

mossop forwarded me the following sets of headers:

Subject: [Bug 718230] console.log no longer logs to the error console
 starting in SDK 1.4
Message-ID: <[e-mail]/>
In-Reply-To: <[e-mail]/>

Subject: [Bug 718230] console.log no longer logs to the error console
 starting in SDK 1.4
Message-ID: <[e-mail]/>
In-Reply-To: <[e-mail]/>

same subject, same in-reply-to, gmail isn't threading them.  wtf gmail?

Comment 7

[Tanay Gavankar [:tgavankar]]

Here're the requested headers from the emails for this bug report (so within the past 12 hours)

Message-ID: <[e-mail]/>
In-Reply-To: <[e-mail]/>


Message-ID: <[e-mail]/>
In-Reply-To: <[e-mail]/>


They are not threaded.

Comment 8

[Tanay Gavankar [:tgavankar]]

Also, if it helps, Django server error emails for support.mozilla.org are threading fine, and have:

Message-ID: <[e-mail]>

There is no in-reply-to. I can pastebin the entire email if you want.

Comment 9

[:glob ✱]

this appears to be only impacting users who use their mozilla.com address on bmo, and then forward bugmail to gmail.  threading is working for people using their gmail account on bmo.

Comment 10

[Dave Dash [:davedash, :dd] (assign all bugs to mbrandt)]

Here's what I have, I do the forwarding method:

https://gist.github.com/1706145

Is there anything glaring there?  Is this due to Zimbra upgrades, perhaps?

Comment 11

[:glob ✱]

i've tried resending a few of tgavankar's non-threaded emails, with full headers, to my gmail account, and gmail threaded them fine.

everything i've read points to gmail threading by the subject.

http://www.sensefulsolutions.com/2010/08/how-does-email-threading-work-in-gmail.html is interesting; and the first comment there notes gmail also uses the "references" header (which bugzilla is sending).

Comment 12

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

One difference that I noticed between the emails that thread and the ones that don't is that the new message IDs (and thus also references: headers) have a trailing /. From reading the spec, I'm not completely sure that that's legal, but even if it is, that could be a bug in gmail that such emails aren't threaded right.

That said, I wish we knew someone on the gmail team who could help debug the issue.

Comment 13

[Dave Dash [:davedash, :dd] (assign all bugs to mbrandt)]

So it's threading for me now.

Comment 14

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

Perhaps because you're not using mozilla.com as your bugmail address anymore? The problem persists for me.

Comment 15

[Dave Dash [:davedash, :dd] (assign all bugs to mbrandt)]

Oh carp, you are right, sorry, I forgot I had done that.

Comment 16

[:glob ✱]

closing stale bug.