Bug 185666

Summary:	Feature to manually break mail out of a thread
Product:	[Applications] kmail2	Reporter:	Maarten ter Huurne <maarten>
Component:	general	Assignee:	kdepim bugs <kdepim-bugs>
Status:	CONFIRMED ---
Severity:	wishlist	CC:	luigi.toscano, pancho.s
Priority:	NOR
Version:	4.9.0
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	unspecified
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Maarten ter Huurne 2009-02-27 01:38:52 UTC

Version:           1.11.0 (using 4.2.00 (KDE 4.2.0) "release 82.1", KDE:KDE4:Factory:Desktop / openSUSE_11.0)
Compiler:          gcc
OS:                Linux (x86_64) release 2.6.25.20-0.1-default

I am using threaded mail display in KMail. I think KMail uses the "In-Reply-To" header to decide that one mail is a child of another mail in the conversation tree. Usually this works well.

The problem is that many senders use the following shortcut to create a mail to a group of people:
1. find an older mail to the same group of people
2. do reply-to-all
3. overwrite the subject and body
To anyone using a non-threading client this looks like a perfect trick. But in my KMail thread view, I see two unrelated conversations within the same group of people in a single thread.

One could argue that we have to educate people not to do that, but I expect very little result from that, especially since people cannot even see the problem if they are not using a threading mail client. So what I would like to have is a way to unchain a mail from its parent, for example by removing the "In-Reply-To" header from the mail.

This option could be in the context menu when right-clicking on the mail line in the thread view, or it could be triggered when dragging the mail line out of the thread. Some other way is fine with me as well, as long as it doesn't involve manually editing the mail headers.

Comment 1 Jaime Torres 2009-03-07 10:04:03 UTC

While kmail implementation of threads also include the References header..
I like your idea, a simple way to make a mail the root of his own thread.

Comment 2 Thomas McGuire 2009-03-19 00:08:33 UTC

See comment #20 of the bug I mark this one a duplicate of, it has a solution for this.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 25594 ***

Comment 3 Maarten ter Huurne 2009-03-19 00:35:26 UTC

Thanks for pointing me to the filter-on-toolbar trick, I'll certainly be using that!

However, I think that is a workaround, not a fix, since this approach is far from obvious for most users. So I'm reopening this bug in the hope someone will make a it a standard feature. Also bug 25594 asks for a way to add a mail to a thread, which is the opposite operation of breaking the connection between a mail and its thread parent.

The filter-on-toolbar trick does make an out-of-the-box solution less urgent, so you could lower the priority of this report (it seems I have no privileges for that).

Comment 4 Myriam Schweingruber 2012-08-18 08:57:37 UTC

Thank you for your feature request. Kmail1 is currently unmaintained so we are closing all wishes. Please feel free to reopen a feature request for Kmail2 if it has not already been implemented.
Thank you for your understanding.

Comment 5 Luigi Toscano 2012-08-19 00:15:07 UTC

Instead of creating a new feature request, please confirm here if the wishlist is still valid for kmail2.

Comment 6 Maarten ter Huurne 2012-08-19 01:12:05 UTC

I just looked through the main menu and the context menu of KMail in Kontact 4.9 and I couldn't find any option there to take a mail out of the thread it is in and become the root of a new thread.

Comment 7 Bernd Oliver Sünderhauf 2012-11-22 23:38:39 UTC

Yes indeed this is still valid and should be much easier to solve than Bug #25594.

To accomplish this, we just need to remove the "In-Reply-To" and "References" headers.
However, this would irreversibly detach the mail, so we might want either of:
- rename the headers to something custom instead, or
- just add a custom header/flag that takes precendence in kmail only (and not in other clients or webmail)

If the latter alternative was the most preferable, then it wouldn't make sense to solve this one without covering Bug #25594 just as well.
However, I think the second alternative is preferable. If a mail doesn't belong to a thread, and the user decides to detach it in an IMAP folder, then he will expect it to be displayed separately in all clients. If the action is reversible using kmail, even better.