Re: nnimap gmail "A T" and "^" not working

[Andrew Cohen]

>>>>> "J" == JibStyle  <jibstyle209@gmail.com> writes:

    J> Andrew Cohen <acohen@ust.hk> writes:

[...]

    >> So jibstyle maybe you can help with some testing? First, for the
    >> purposes of the test can you 1. Set 'gnus-refer-thread-use-search
    >> to 'nil, 2. Enter the "[Gmail]/All Mail" group and find an
    >> article late in the thread on which you know thread referral
    >> fails to find the full thread.  Examine the headers of this
    >> article (by typing C-g when point is on the article in the
    >> summary buffer) and see what is in the References header? And
    >> what mailer was used to send the message?
    >> 
    >> For example when I do this I find the headers contain
    >> 
    >> In-Reply-To: <CAKfuin7MPjj5m@mail.gmail.com> References:
    >> <CAKfuin7MPjj5m@mail.gmail.com> X-Mailer: iPhone Mail (19E258)
    >> 
    >> which shows that the References header only contains the
    >> immediately prior email's message-id but not that of any of the
    >> other messages.

    J> Thanks for helping out here. I'm novice in email protocol. My
    J> `gnus-refer-thread-use-search' is nil. Yes, I can reproduce the
    J> iPhone specific issue you described above (see Issue1 below). In
    J> fact, I am also experiencing two additional issues (Issue2 and
    J> Issue3 below), for which I do not believe iPhone is culprit (can
    J> repro using only Gnus). To reproduce all these issues, I sent and
    J> replied to emails to myself to produce the necessary thread
    J> structures.

    J> Summary of my three separate nnimap+gmail "A T" issues:

    J> - Issue1: Grandparent not found when only one "References" entry.

There is little we can do about this---if the references header doesn't
contain the right information we can't know what messages to fetch
(while we could "walk" up the tree this isn't practical, since we would
have to construct a separate search and a new network connection for
each step). And not adding the references is broken behavior and should
be fixed by the mailer.

    J> - Issue2: Parent from different group not found.  

This is the intended behavior. If you want messages from different
groups to be found you need to set 'gnus-refer-thread-use-search to 't. 

    J> - Issue3: Siblings and descendants not found.

[...]

    J> Reproduction steps, Issue3:

    J> - RootArticle - ChildA - GrandchildA - ChildB - GrandchildB

    J> - Use `gnus-summary-post-news' and `gnus-summary-followup' to
    J> produce above message tree with two branches.  - Read all
    J> articles except ChildA.  - In Gnus, go to "[Gmail]/All Mail"
    J> summary buffer. You should only see ChildA. Now press "A T".  -
    J> EXPECTED: RootArticle, GrandchildA, ChildB, and GrandchildB
    J> should appear.  - RESULT: RootArticle appears. GrandchildA does
    J> not appear. ChildB and GrandchildB do not appear.

This doesn't happen for me. As far as I can tell "A T" search is working
correctly in gmail when the references header is correct. The gnus
strategy is simple: when you type "A T" on a message the message-id of
that message and ALL message-ids in the references header are used as
search keys. The search asks for all messages whose references header
contains any one of those keys. For mailers that adhere to the standard
this will find all articles in the thread, future and past.

To diagnose further you will need to do what I asked you earlier: find
the references header, the in-reply header, and the original message-id
header for the initiating article and for the article that wasn't found.

Best,
Andy
-- 
Andrew Cohen