[Alpine-info] RFE: Sort by Reply-To: header

[Eduardo Chappa]

On Wed, 2 Mar 2022, Andrew C Aitchison wrote:


> More and more mailing lists are, for good reasons, rewriting the From: 

> address, at least for some messages sent to the list.

>

> Would it be possible for alpine to have an option of sorting mails by 

> the Reply-To: header so that we can see the messages from one such 

> sender together ?


Dear Andrew,

   before I bore you to death of the reasons why this is not possible, I'd 
like you to consider an alternative approach, which is to "; select" 
messages based on the content of an arbitrary header. This can be done by 
using the select command to select by a header, so you would press "; T" 
to select by text, but this time you press "H" to specify the header you 
want, so a complete sequence of keystrokes would be something like

   ; t h in-reply-to <return> content-you-are-searching-for

<return> means press the return key.

   Why not sorting? Because IMAP has not defined that. Why does this 
matter? Maybe other clients can do it. The answer is that Alpine is an 
online client, so it can only do what a server can do (or in local folders 
what an IMAP server can do). Since sorting by in-reply-to has not been 
defined, this is not something you would expect a server to do, or a 
client to request.

   You could implement such sorting through a patch. In the case of folders 
in servers you would have implement this by doing what the /loser flag 
does, which is to download all the envelopes from the folder and then do 
the sorting locally. Local folders is similar to /loser, except that you 
should take for granted. Remember that not all message have an in-reply-to 
header, so for those, you probably want to set the in-reply-to content to 
the value of the from (or sender?) field, and then figure out a second key 
for sorting for messages that have the same origin, etc.

   I hope this helps to understand the issue.

   Thank you.

-- 
Eduardo