Re: mutt ignores certain message-ID's?

[Kyle Wheeler <kyle-mutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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On Tuesday, March 18 at 06:06 PM, quoth Vincent van Leeuwen:
>All the messages have Message-ID's and References or In-Reply-To 
>headers which all seem to be correct. However, the Message-ID's from 
>person B do look a bit odd:
>
>Message-ID: <000001c88053$c54232f0$4fc698d0$@helder@example.com>

Technically, it's not just odd, but an invalid message-id. Message-IDs 
may only have a single @ symbol in them. What email client generated 
that?

>Can it be that Mutt doesn't recognise that Message-ID as a real one 
>and ignores it for threading purposes?

That's exactly correct. Mutt holds invalid message-id's in dim regard, 
because they're so much more likely to be forgeries. Several mail 
clients do bad things in this regard, including using email addresses 
as the "message-id". Mutt does some gymnastics to try and accept as 
many weird variants of message-id's as it can, but there's a limit, 
and you've found one: mutt explicitly ignores so-called message-ids 
that have more than one @ symbol. So when parsing the References 
header, this message-id is ignored.

Part of the reason for this is the philosophy "be conservative in what 
you send, liberal in what you accept." Mutt is trying to avoid putting 
invalid message-id's in the "References" header of email that it 
sends.

>If so, is there anything I can do (except editing the messages by 
>hand ofcourse) to make Mutt thread them properly again?

It depends on what you're trying to achieve. If you want mutt to 
display the threads properly, then editing them by hand (or feeding 
them to a script) to alter the Message-ID into something that is 
valid, and then using the & key to force generate the References 
header in the reply is probably the only solution.

If you want mutt to ignore the fact that the message-id is invalid, 
you can edit mutt's source, but I don't recommend that.

~Kyle
- -- 
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