Mac Forum / General / Networking / May 2005

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Yes, and mine has about a hundred at this point, but filter rules cannot
do what the original poster is asking for, and what myself and others
have asked Qualcomm for repeatedly over the past decade-plus.

You are using MT-Newswatcher, which has real threading of the sort
described: you can have it thread a group by references and the ordering
of posts and indentations of the subjects provides a map of which posts
are responses to which others and they are ordered so that going to the
next unread post in sequence (i.e. spacebar if you have the main
keyboard shortcuts option on) walks the tree of a discussion thread in a
depth-first manner, following from a root message down through the first
response and its responses and their responses then on to the next
response, and so on. Because this system uses the References header, it
is impervious to Subject changes in a thread, to the arrival order of
the messages, to the vagaries of incorrect Date headers, and even to
some degree to missing links in the thread. All of this is completely
automatic.

References headers exist in email as well. Eudora generates them
properly on mail it creates. Other mailers (such as Forte Agent, and
reportedly Mozilla Thunderbird) provide References based threading for
mail. For discussion-oriented mailing lists that feature is extremely
useful. There is no way to replicate that with Eudora or even come close
to it, no matter how many filter rules you write. You can get some of
the same functionality by sorting by date and grouping by subject in a
mailbox, and you can get one-off location of all descendants of a
specific message by searching (or filtering) on a particular MID in
References headers, and if you tweak the right setting you can assure
that your MID's are all of a predictable pattern that you can filter on
to flag descendants of your messages. None of that, not even all of it
combined, is References-based threading, and you can do all of it and
still miss functionality that such threading would provide.

Okay -- maybe Moodwatch isn't all that important, but should they now
take it out just to stop the complaints?

From what I hear, some professor somewhere wrote the technology as an
example, and so they threw it in.  Might add to bloat, but did not add
much time that could have been used on other efforts.

But as above, I don't think the complaining will stop unless/until they
remove it, which would be silly now that they have it!

-Andrew

It works well for me, but I can't say for sure if it works the way you
want because I don't read my mail that way.  All I can suggest is that
you give it a spin and see if you like it.  It comes with a 30 day trial.

It's not a newsreader either.  :-)

I've used MacSOUP as my email client for eight years, almost non-stop. I
assure you it is a very capable plain text email program. References
based threading, regular expression filtering, a nifty address book in
classic and integration with Apple's MacOS X address book. Lots of nice
features, but no sending attachment support, non-hierarchic mailboxes,
no word services support. It's very bare bones, but has still served me
better than any other client I've tried in eight years.

I just wish I could get the power and simplicity of MacSOUP along with
Eudora or Mailsmith's nifty features.

Regards,
Jamie Kahn Genet