# Discourse Emails not threaded properly in some Email clients

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-emails-not-threaded-properly-in-some-email-clients/44444
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [Mai 18, 2016, 3:43 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-emails-not-threaded-properly-in-some-email-clients/44444 "2016-05-18T15:43:54Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 9

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### Author: ![kgoetz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/bb73d2/32.png) [@kgoetz](https://meta.discourse.org/u/kgoetz)
#### Post date: [Novembre 2, 2016, 11:38 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-emails-not-threaded-properly-in-some-email-clients/44444/9 "2016-11-02T11:38:24Z")

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Hi @riking ,  
Could you describe how to create the situation where a post is referring to posts both above and below it? I did some stuffing around in our discourse install and couldn’t replicate that behaviour.

To answer your question: In-Reply-To should point to the previous post made IF the current post quotes it, or the OP if it doesn’t.

On this subject, I’ve seen [topic reply] @codinghorror comment that “All topic replies are conceptually “in reply to” the topic, though.” which he has repeated in [always topic] and recently in [flat replies] - its definitely the established view!

[topic reply]

> [@Emails are not threaded in Outlook 2013](https://meta.discourse.org/t/emails-are-not-threaded-in-outlook-2013/16501/10):
>
> All topic replies are conceptually “in reply to” the topic, though.

[always topic]

> [@Emails are not threaded in Outlook 2013](https://meta.discourse.org/t/emails-are-not-threaded-in-outlook-2013/16501/28):
>
> What you describe is impossible – I don’t know how to get, in Ruby code, the message ID header that the mail server appends to emails at the time it sends them, before dispatching the email. That ID doesn’t even exist until the message is being transmitted. Those ids are created at the time the message is sent by the mail server as far as I know, and they are internal to the mail server software. Also, the “in reply to” should always be in reply to the original topic creation, the first post o…

[flat replies]

> [@Discourse Emails not threaded properly in some Email clients](https://meta.discourse.org/t/emails-not-threaded/44444/5):
>
> All replies are replies to the parent topic, from Discourse’s perspective. A first post with lots of flat replies to that first post. One level of threading only, the topic. So I don’t think what you are proposing is correct.

While true to an extent, when discourse is being used as a mailing list replacement the expectation that posts are linear is no longer true and it would be good for the headers to support that use case.  
They almost do now!

thanks,

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