JPALME%QZCOM.BITNET@MITVMA.MIT.EDU (Jacob Palme QZ) (02/08/88)
Many people have the problem of not having time to read all the mail they receive from various mailing lists. One way of alleviating this problem is to include the concept of *conversation* in the local mail software. By a conversation is meant a set of messages replated by In-reply-to-links. A user who does not want to read any more messages within one conversation, can give a command to this effect, and his local mail software will then skip those messages. I hope that more and more mail delivery software will have such facilities. We already have it to some extent in our COM system, and will give more support for this in the new SuperCOM system we are currently developing. The problem, however, is that this only works if all messages have Message-ID fields, and if replies use the In-reply-to field to refer to hte Message-ID of the replied-to message. I would therefore urge those of you who are developing mail software to at least include such handling of Message-ID and In-reply-to fields in your mail software.