threads in mozilla news

Hello,

I'm looking at different alternatives to OE as a newsreader. Mozilla
could be one of them, however, I am puzzled by the way it organize the
threads. In alt.test.test I realized that if I created a new thread with
the same subject as another thread, my thread would be put as a reply
post to the other thread. Why is this, and how can I change this
behaviour? Am I doing something wrong?

 

Threads are what in computer science people call trees.
You have for each message, an ancestor (the message that the actual
message replies to), and several sons (the messages in reply). There is
a convenient way to indicate that filiation, it is the MID (Message-ID)
and the references (that indicate all the MIDs of the parent, the parent
of the parent, and so on). So you get a nice threading system, that
allows you to change the subject of a message, and still have it in the
thread (= the thread is not broken).

Some mail & newsgroup client do not provide the "References:" field when
they create a message, so another way of staying in the thread is to
compare the "Subject:" field to the other messages that have already
been received by you. That's the behavior you are experiencing on
alt.test.test .

Now, Mozilla does one algorithm (check the References), and if he
doesn't find the information, he does the second algorithm. afaik there
is no way to desactivate that second algorithm.

*BUT* !

You can change the way Mozilla displays threads, for instance only show
threads that contain unread messages. That does not prevent the huge
"Test" thread to appear huge, but it prevents you from seeing thousands
of threads which messages have already been read by you.