Languages. I love them, but as a developer, wish everyone used English.
Here in Russia everyone is used to Re and Fwd -- but Hotmail uses localized prefixes.
So when I saw "Отв: test 1" last night ("Отв" - "Ответ" - response, answer as a noun), it almost made me fall under my desk.
I am subscribed to an international mailing list, and every so often, I see some national analogues of "Re:". E.g. from one author from .dk, it comes as "SV:".
Then what happens frequently is that there is a chain looking like:
Subject: Re: SV: RE: Fwd: Nonsense (fwd)
Some programs are trying to avoid this long chain (Re: Re: Re: Re:...), but
when it is many languages they can fail..
And what I meant to say yesterday, some e-mail programs, consider that a subject like
"Subject: OT: viral video" ("OT" for "Off Topic")
contains a response prefix from a different locale, and in response to that writes not "Subject: Re: OT: viral video", but rather "Subject: Re: viral video".
And they even do that with some longer, 3-4 letter words with a colon at the end
(PESO:, FSF: ... )
And then, when it goes through a mailing list, if the mailing list adds [ListName] to the subject, and different mail clients work differently with that which ends in something like that:
Subject: [ListName] Re: [ListName] Re: Whatever
I am also getting some messages from one Russian source that use Russian "НА:" as a prefix. It is either from some Outpook or possibly web-based interface interface to a corporate Exchange mail.
I am looking at one of the actual e-mail subjects:
Subject: Re: HA: HA: Re: HA: HA: HA: photo
Additionally, the "message read" confirmations (I hate those), - add the prefix "Read:" to the subject. And once, when the conversation was about those confirmations, my correspondent was replying to the confirmation message, to show how it looks... It was a weird chain of "Read: Re: ..."
Now, one more realistic business situation.
There is a discussion/conversation with a Subject: Threading error.
Then someone adds: "Subject: Resolved? Was: Threading error.", continuing the the same discussion.
Finally, once in a while, a person accidentally types an extra character in the Subject field or accidentally erases the last character or two (I've done that myself a few times).
So, basically, all these cases are indicating that if you wanted to do subject-matching, you need to implement some fuzzy matching.
Re: you are not going to make the judgement based on the irrelevant content, are you
Not sure I got that, "irrelevant content"?
Well it was an attempt at a semi-joke...
How exactly you match all those weird subject is a question about figuring out what is a change in the subject and what is not.
So, I was suggesting to extend the same approach to the message body, - in case some {ab}users respond to the old thread
without changing the subject, while writing about totally new (thus,
irrelevant) matter.
There are some heuristic algorithms that are trying to deal with matching the e-mail content in combination with the Subject (I believe those are implemented by mail-archive.com engine.) mail-archive.com seems to recognize conversations and make decisions on the conversation tree arrangement based on: (a) "message-id:" references, (b) "In-reply-to:", and, if those are missing, (c) combination of "Subject:" with some matching of the quoted text...
If there is matching subject, but no quoted text, it doesn't add that message to the existing thread.
But I agree, let's NOT venture in that area!
Subject is now a relevant factor in message linking logic.
I don't have plans for any additional heuristics based on recipients or dates or anything else.
Partly because of performance, partly because I want to be "done" with it, and finally, the logic needs to be simple enough for me to be able to explain it to users (if they ask).
Agree, and I think what several people here are suggesting to drop even the Subject, because that has too many "edge" cases.
The priority right now is to avoid *horribly messing up* the user's inbox to the point where he/she *is unable to find a message*.
I agree, but ...
I didn't care much for the conversation view prior to starting using it. But I got hooked on it with dev1 through dev1.4.
Last night dev1.6 broke 2 out of 4 or 5 current threads in the most active account. And I understand you are trying to avoid that too:
Finally, has anyone actually run into some horrible confusing situation because some messages, with different subjects, didn't get grouped?
I had this 7-messages-long thread. It was exchange with the support of box.com (which is handled via zendesk.com engine).
It got all separated under -dev1.6. And some of those seem to share the subject..
Yet another thread that got separated is less important, but still, it is not what I'd expect...
Kostya I will try to e-mail you the messages for analysis...