[tlug] OT Thread Hijacking

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Kenneth Burling writes:

 > Is it possible to hijack a thread without realizing it?

Yes, people do exactly that all the time.  Most people who hijack
threads do so unknowingly.

 > lately, in several places), where a person is accused of hijacking
 > a thread, but my email viewer (in this case Gmail) has that message
 > as the front of its own thread.

Gmail doesn't thread.  It has "conversations".  I'm not sure what the
semantics of "conversation" is, precisely, but it's clearly not quite
the same as threading, although in many cases you wouldn't be able to
tell the difference.


 > One question.  If a person hits reply to an email, and then changes
 > the subject completely and changes the body of the message
 > completely (empties it and starts over) is there any reason that an
 > email client should put that message into anything other than a new
 > thread?

Yes.

Technically, threading is done with the In-Reply-To and References
headers.  In-Reply-To contains the message-ID of one or more messages
which are being replied to.  It's very rare to see multiple message
IDs, though.  References contains some selection of message IDs from
recent messages in the thread.  Both of these headers are normally
hidden by email clients.

So a thread is a series of messages linked by In-Reply-To in the
simplest case.  If References is available, a message need not contain
a threading header to become part of a thread, as long as some other
message refers to it.

For more details (and some delicious flamage) I can recommend

                http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html