[quote user="David Harris"] Have you tried using grouped views? I'm pretty sure that the thread grouped view does what you're describing (unless I'm not understanding it properly)[/quote]

Tried this tonight, having received a relevant sequence of messages.  Leaving aside the matter that I prefer my folder lists ungrouped anyway, in fact the only additional feature I can find that makes any use of overall message dates within a thread is Group by Thread Activity, but that sorts on the date of the latest message in the thread, not the earliest.

The other difficulty I would have with groups stems from the fact that I like to have my new emails listed oldest first, and I progress downwards though the folder as I read them.  So I enable the Sort in Reverse Order toggle.  With threads, this does what I want - the threads are in thread order and the messages then in increasing date/time order - but using a grouped view this setting also reverses the order the groups are listed, which I don't really want.

The facility for sorting mail folders into threads in Pegasus isn't too bad, but there is one improvement that could be made to the way the threads themselves (as opposed to the messages within each thread) the are sorted.

At present, threads are sorted by subject line.  Unfortunately, this means that if a thread (say 'Re: Z') has several messages but then someone replies with a partial change of subject and changes the subject line to, say, 'A (was Re: Z)', then Pegasus sorts the new A... thread before the earlier Z thread.  This is quite annoying:  I often read emails in batches of 50-100 in one 'session' and it's most disconcerting to find myself reading a reply when I haven't yet seen the message it's replying to.

What you really want is the threads sorted on that the date/time of their earliest message.  This would result in the Z thread correctly appearing before the A thread.

Have you tried using grouped views? I'm pretty sure that the thread grouped view does what you're describing (unless I'm not understanding it properly)

Cheers!

-- David --

 

David

I'll try that next time I receive a suitable sequence of messages, and let you know.  However in general I hate grouped views in mail folders and the first thing I did with this in Outlurk (which I'm lumbered with at work) was to switch it off!

Thinking a bit more, though, there are a number of smarter threading features that I'd find handy.  First, I use Yahoo! Groups a lot, and receive a lot of messages with a group name in square brackets - as I have also set up my PM-WIN list subscription to do.  Ideally, the threading algorithm would be able (through configuration, eg another set of regular expression strings) to extract these group names and use this as the first criterion for sorting the threads.  This should be done before processing the prefixes configured in the PREFIX.PM file.  This order of doing things is important because there are some groups where I get subject line variants such as the following:

• [Group] A
• [Group] Re: A
• Re: [Group] A
• Re: [Group] Re: A

These all, of course, belong to a single thread, but the current logic can't deal with this amount of variation.

If the thread groups resulting from the above could then be sorted by (i) group name and then (ii) date of earliest message in thread, then I'd get all messages from each group sorted together plus each group of threads then arranged so I never reach a message that was a reply to one I haven't yet seen.

BTW I just saw your other post about automation, maybe smarter threading is one area where this could become extremely useful!

Adie

Would it help to add [Group] to the exclusion list for sorting? Not sure if that helps but perhaps worth a try.

See the file prefix.pm in the Pegasus Mail Program Directory for more information.

[quote user="Han v.d. Bogaerde"]Would it help to add [Group] to the exclusion list for sorting? Not sure if that helps but perhaps worth a try.[/quote]

I did consider that, but didn't pursue it initially because one of the advantages of keeping [Group] in the subject line - with it usually being at the start of the line - is that the threads are roughly sorted by group.  This is something I find very convenient as I can then read most of all of the postings for a group together.  It also makes filing quicker as I generally keep a separate folder for each group.

For the record, the way I'd ideally like Pegasus to sort my incoming emails is as follows:

1.  Catgeorise messages into groups according to whether the subject line contains a [Group].  Include a "null category" for messages with no [Group].

2.  Group messages within each category into threads as done now, removing the [Group] text and following the rules in PREFIX.PM as done currently.

3.  Sort the threads within each category by the date/time of the earliest message in each thread.

4.  Within each thread, sort the messages in increasing date/time order as done now.

5.  List the messages in category - thread - date/time order. 

I have just been looking at threading in PM, having not used it before. I would echo the feeling that it is reasonable but could be improved significantly. I am now using Group by Activity, together with incoming filtering to route mail to folders, and it works OK.

I also get mail from multiple groups which add [GROUP] or whatever in the subjects. As suggested, adding [GROUP] (and [SPAM] etc) in the list of exclusions in prefix.pm makes these sort correctly in one thread. I did not get very far setting up wildcard expressions though, maybe the documentation needs expanding a little.

I have the following comments/suggestions:

At moment PM threads solely based on the SUBJECT line and ignores the 'In-reply-to' and 'references' lines. This means that messages with identical subjects, such as 'Sunday', end up grouped together even though they are totally unassociated.

Each group has a header formed (and truncated) from the subject of the most recent post in that thread. Surely it is more logical for it to be the first, oldest, post? For threads which have only one message in them it seems logical to dispense with the header entirely as it is more clicks to open it. In fact could we not get rid of the headers entirely, just display the messages with an expand button on the left, just like my Opera newsgroups does?