That makes sense, and I know *I* would be a bit happier if my e-mails where threaded in my desk-top client.

What you are suggesting is taking it one step further: remove the unique code from the subject and depend on the email client to put in the correct Message-ID headers when responding. That largely works, especially since Jive creates unique reply-to email addresses for all combinations of subscribed user and thread. Some email clients however do not include a proper References and/or In-Reply-To header and then Jive would have no other option but to append the message to the end of the thread. This will most definitely allow web based systems such as Gmail to thread, but may cause some fat clients to always post at the end of the thread.

IMHO, the first part is quick and easy and somebody should start coding tomorrow. The second part is something that needs to be carefully considered and the best way forward there may be to just grab a sample of a few thousand replies after the first part has been implemented to see how good the average users email client is.

That is my rudimentary understanding. I am sure Jochem can say more when he has time. But my impression is that this was not a new problem that Jive had to solve. It was long ago addressed in the e-mail standards for list servers. If they would just format the e-mails properly we - OK people like Jochem - could build on functionality and their system would still know where to post the replies received from users by e-mail.

As you know, the characters that are appended at the end of the subject lines (which makes it impossible to sort by subject) is there to allow the system to know where to post the reply when users reply by email.

If we had unique message identifiers in the references/in-reply-to fields, does the subject line’s uniqueness become a non-issue and allow the threading to work?

Thanks in advance for sharing your knowledge on the topic.

If we had unique identifiers in the references/in-reply-to fields, does the subject line’s uniqueness become a non-issue and allow the threading to work?

I find the new forums unuseable because of the speed.

@Adam My participation in the forums is down to almost nothing. And hopefully Adobe will notice that the NNTP users were the responders to most of the questions on the forums.

I look forward to following any progress you may have with regaining NNTP access and|or web service API replacements.

If you do not mind a side question, I would like to know more about your news reader that allowed you to ignore threads when desired. That is a feature I have wanted, but not quite enough to go find on my own. But your post presented an opportunity to satisfy a long, if somewhat low priority, annoyance.