At 20:20 18/06/03 -0400, Nathaniel Borenstein wrote:
The only downside I can see to this proposal (and indeed, it is
potentially a problem with Pete's original proposal) is that the length
of the Threads header (or the References header in Pete's case) can get
long. Is there going to be a problem with MTAs truncating the header?
Maybe, but I think I'd take a wait and see attitude. A recent study of
ours (of ~42000 messages across 8 users) shows that 8010021331513f email
threads (old-fashioned ones, not Pete's fancy ones) are 5 or fewer
nodes. The 97 0x4046acfcoint was at 16 nodes.
Just a random thought...
if one assumes that some of the thread information may be available from
earlier messages, and that an application that seriously uses this
information will also have access to the earlier messages, is there scope
here for collapsing burgeoning historic thread information into a hash that
can be used to confirm the sending agent's knowledge of the threads in
progress.
Maybe that's overkill: if an agent supplies just recent generation thread
history in any message it sends, I think the complete thread structure can
be assembled from the various messages.
Now I'll return to my normal programming...
#g
-------------------
Graham Klyne
<GK(_at_)NineByNine(_dot_)org>
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