Re: rmail threading

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > Once you request a summary based on filtering, the unfiltered summary
  > is gone.  So I can no longer quickly and conveniently look for
  > messages that were filtered out by scrolling the summary buffer or by
  > searching in it.

I see your point (though M-s will search through all messages, regardless of
the summary).  I don't notice this because I never make an unfiltered summary.

This suggests we should have a convenient way to make multiple
summaries of a single Rmail buffer, and keep them in parallel.
What do you think of that?

  > > A summary in Rmail doesn't stop you from looking at messages not
  > > included in it.  I do that frequently.

  > Can you tell how do you do that?

If you have the Rmail buffer selected, the summary does not affect the
ordinary Rmail commands.  They move through the whole file unaffected
by the summary.

  > And I have one additional question about your request to have a
  > summary-by-thread: is it okay to request that the user first sorts the
  > messages by date (C-c C-s C-d), before summarizing the thread?

That would be a pain in the neck for me.  I don't want to reorder
RMAIL file.

If you go through all the messages making a Lispy data structure that
records the most important header fields of each, and its message
number, it would be pretty easy to sort that data structure and then
find the threads in it.  Then you could display the thread summary
either by send order or by order in the Rmail file.

Hmm, it would be interesting to make the Rmail sort commands operate
on a summary buffer by sorting the summary instead of the Rmail file.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)