Re: Fixing news-mail gateway [Was: Re: Newsgroups mailing-list gateway broken thread]

[Bob Proulx <bob@proulx.com>]

Nuno Silva wrote:
> Bob Proulx wrote:
> > AFAICT messages through the Stanford newsgroup to email relay do not
> > include the In-Reply-To header and therefore break threading.  A
> > message may have the References header with information about previous
> > messages in the thread causing the message to thread before where it
> > should thread, and if only one deep them be completely disconnected
> > from the original thread.
> 
> I might be wrong, but it looks like the In-reply-to header *is* sent,
> but the message-ids are being rewritten somewhere, so one message can
> end up with two different message-ids, and threading by In-reply-to will
> not work as expected. The "Message not available" entries in the web
> archive are probably those message-ids.

Hmm...  You are right that at least some mail messages from the
Stanford newsgroup gateway do include In-Reply-To headers.  Most do
not however.  In the last three months of the archive 38 messages that
came through the gateway included In-Reply-To out of 285 messages
total through that gateway with 247 not including it.  At least some
of those not including it were starting a new thread and were not
replies so that normal for those.

This nature of it with some having it and some not having it is a good
clue that I had previously missed.  It might indicate that one of the
newsgroup relays is causing the issue and it depends upon how the
message routed through the newsgroup relays before arriving at
Stanford and getting gatewayed to the mailing list.  It will need more
analysis to see if we can correlate it with one specific host.

Bob