On Wed, Jan 30 2013, David Bremner <david@tethera.net> wrote:
> Let me step back a level and say that special casing git patch series
> strikes me as not yet seeing the problem in enough generality. Others
> might disagree, of course.

I agree with this statement.

So I encounter the thread hijacking problem occasionally, but not
frequently enough that I would trust a particular heuristic to cover it.
I think I would prefer to just split hijacked threads manually as I
encounter them.

Just a thought: what if messages with a given tag (e.g. "new-thread")
were always treated as the source of a new thread?  A message with the
given tag could just be (re)indexed with any In-Reply-To/References
headers stripped before indexing.  This would allow users to break
threads manually, and it would mean dump && restore would always return
the same state.

The actual thread breaking, or specifically where it happens, would have
to be thought through a bit.  Maybe this could be rolled into notmuch
new somehow?  Or some other top-level function that applies operations
to messages based on tags?

jamie.