Mailing list mode: threading is broken

Hi all, as member of the openstreetmap I found several problems with disourse, which is used for their online forum now.

I was told that the mailing list interface should work very well. However, I found a but that threading becomes broken when you reply by e-mail. Then a new message ID is generated instead of re-using the original ones

Example
The main concept is ok - it used e.g.

format: thread msg-id in-reply-id
1 topic/851.

the initial thread

1.1 topic/851/2747. topic/851

Message 2747 in thread 851 is a reply to initial topic 851, as indicated by the headers in-reply-to: and references:

1.1.1 ee76eed4-a255-6d1c-0f5b-59da9772f230@gmx topic/851/2747.

That’s an e-mail reply to topic/851/2747 with message id ee76eed4-a255-6d1c-0f5b-59da9772f230@gmx

1.1.1.1 topic/851/2749. ee76eed4-a255-6d1c-0f5b-59da9772f230@gmx

Here the forum reply 2749 threads properly to my message-id ee76eed4-a255-6d1c-0f5b-59da9772f230@gmx

1.1.1.1.1 07289952-0e88-c08a-ea66-b34774c8554e@gmx topic/851/2749.

…and so on

However, when I do reply in msg-id ee76eed4-a255-6d1c-0f5b-59da9772f230@gmx to the previous topic, I reference

References:… <topic/851/2747. bae9c8af72f1f7ef599f1bcd @OSM>

But my own message (a HTML forum version) is sent back to me with
References: …
<topic/851/2747. ae42d62b1252f1572b2a9a07 @OSM>

Do you notice the difference within the message id of the references?

The forum’s system does break message ids within references!

This results in broken threads with
1.2 topic/851/2748. topic/851/2747.
1.3 topic/851/2751. topic/851/2749.

where 1.2 is the forum version of 1.1.1 (new message-id topic/851/2748.e6be773dbcc599ad5f35bae5@OSM instead of my original message-id)
and 1.3 is the forum version of 1.1.1.1.1

I did not verify yet whether others receive crippled threads - since they would not receive my original reply with message-id of
1.1.1 ee76eed4-a255-6d1c-0f5b-59da9772f230@gmx,
but would also receive the forum version
1.2 with message id topic/851/2748.e6be773dbcc599ad5f35bae5@OSM, while also receiving reply
1.1.1.1 with references to ee76eed4-a255-6d1c-0f5b-59da9772f230@gmx

I have crippled the domain names here since this forum translates those message IDs to mailto links and thus exceeds my limit of permitted links

2 Likes

Thanks for reporting, I am just going to move this post into the Email threading broken topic.

3 Likes

A post was merged into an existing topic: Email threading broken