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Re: Show my replies in thread



On 2009-02-27, Kyle Wheeler <kyle-mutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Friday, February 27 at 06:08 PM, quoth Carlos Pita:
>> I don't think this is supported but I'm going to ask it anyway. I 
>> would like to see my replies intercalated in threads.
>
> That's the way *my* email works. :)
>
>> I use gmail imap server,
>
> Ew... Well, you may be out of luck there, I don't know.

There's nothing particularly odd about the Gmail IMAP server
(in some ways it's less "weird" than the courier one).

> The trick is that your replies must be stored in the same folder as 
> the messages you're replying to.
>
> One way of doing this (on a NORMAL mail server) is to change the value 
> of $record:
>
>      folder-hook . 'set record=^'
>
> That will assure that the value of $record is whatever folder you're 
> currently in. You can be more intelligent about it based on replies to 
> lists or whatever... but that should work for you (it works for me!).

That will work fine with the Gmail imap server.

> Of course, that then means that sent messages are NOT stored
> in a centralized "sent" folder. If this is important to you...
> then you may be in trouble.

I prefer to keep them in the folder with the messag to which
they're replying

>> At least, is it a way to quickly open a mail referenced by the 
>> in-reply-to header?
>
> Not if it's in a different folder.

One thing that is interesting about the Gmail IMAP server is
that a message can exist in multiple folders at the same time.
This is actually a pretty powerful concept. In reality there's
a database with a single copy of each message, and IMAP
"folders" are almost exactly analogous to Unix directories
which contain links to i-nodes: there's only one copy of the
file, and it's associated with a single i-node, but you can
have as many links to that i-node from as many directories as
you want.

So, maybe you could add some sort of hook to save outbound mail
in the sent mail folder and also copy it to the ^ folder.  Mail
sent via the web interface gets copied into a folder named
"[Gmail]/Sent Mail", so if you want to keep things consistent,
you should configure that as your "record" folder in mutt.

I thought about suggesting a patch to make "record" accept a
list of multiple folders, but if mutt uploads the outgoing
message twice (to two different folders), then you _do_ end up
with two separate, identical messages on the Gmail server. That
isn't what you want if you sometimes use the web interface.  If
you want to do things "right", you need to upload the outbound
message _once_ to an IMAP folder, and then use IMAP's COPY
command to create a link to the message from the second folder.

[The "link from a folder to a message" I'm talking about is
what Gmail calls a "label".]

-- 
Grant