[oclug] Threads

[Rod Giffin]

CroombeFP wrote:
>What, exactly, are "threads"? I keep coming across the term but I do not
>understand what it means. Is it something to do with linking together
>e-mails of similar subject matter/content? 

Yes sort of.  At least a discussion thread is that.  There's another kind of 
thread you'll hear us talk about from time to time too... but it's
about programming multi-tasking applications.  Hasn't been discussed
here for a while. 

> If so, how does one set them
> up and use them?

If your e-mail client (Evolution in your case) supports threads, you 
should be able to relate messages by what they were replies to.  It's 
more than just relating and sorting messages based on the subject, 
the message header usually contains reference ID components called 
"In-Reply-To" and "References" for what message if any was being 
replied to.  The e-mail  client uses that information to build the 
threads.

(If you display full headers, you'll usually see that in the information
at the top of the message.)

I THINK evolution can display messages sorted by threads.

I prefer to reverse sort by time received instead because I get sometimes
several hundred messages at once.  Also  unfortunately this webmail 
client that I'm using now is lame and does not properly handle the 
in-reply-to header.

I'm in the process of switching to a better provider, for those of you
who have expressed annoyance at that recently.

Rod.