zigm
commented
2 years ago The proposed feature seems to place large burden on users and possibly non-trivial enhancements to MBox Viewer to make reordering more user friendly. Not exactly sure what interaction you think would be helpful.
Before reordering could take place, mails belonging to the same thread need to be discovered. Discovery could start from a single mail and keep expanding by searching newly discovered message ids, etc. Mail pruning would have to be supported too. Eventually, reordering based on time would need to take place. Alternatively, user could reorder discovered mails manually. Final result would have to be recorded in the new mbox file.
Current MBox Viewer can discover conversation threads based on Gmail thread id or based on the message ids. Discovery based on message ids is not perfect and could/should be enhanced.
I suspect newsfeeds have large number of newsgroups so you would have to apply reordering steps to potentially large number of groups. It sounds like tremendous effort unless reordering is automatic or require very small input from users.
I tried to find example newsfeed mbox files by browsing http://archive.org/ but had hard time to find such files. Few concrete links would be helpfull.
I suspect the the proposed feature will not be used by large number of users. Small(er) complexity and small(er) implementation effort helps to accept this and other feature requests.
I will soon be traveling for next two months. I may have a bit of time to think about the request but implementation will have to wait, assuming the request is accepted after detailed analysis.
afarlie
''' What is the problem you are trying to solve?'''
Archive,org provides a series of mbox archive files which contain the postings to various newsgroups (USENET/NNTP). (See Issue #35 for a more general request in respect of USENET support)
However, there are a few usability issues with these archives.
This is in some instances results in replies to postings appearing in listings 'before' the nominal posting they are replying.
'''What would you like the application to do?'''
Provide a mechanism or process whereby a user can select a 'posting', and then by a series of semi-interactive prompts, 're-order' or 're-thread' postings semi-interactively, in order to reconstruct a nominal corrected thread/posting order, based on header information (such as Message-ID's , Google Thread ID's, partial dates and other information in the postings concerned.
The application, would then cautiously modify/update information in the mbox file and it's internal index, potentially reconstructing a new References (and other relevant fields) for postings as required. There is no need to provide the ability to reconstruct or add complete dates from 'partial' dates, although if implemented this should be a seperate header field from the original Date field (such as RevisedDate , or DateAnnotation, which the application could use in the future to reconstruct a nominal order.)