Re: Subject-only thread order

[Earl Hood <ehood@hydra.acs.uci.edu>]

On January 16, 2001 at 17:02, Andrew Johnson wrote:

> Can anyone explain the order in which the following messages appear in a
> thread index created by MHonArc 2.4.7 from an old mail archive which
> unfortunately had all the cross-reference headers removed so has to be
> threaded by Subject.  My rcfile contains both <TSort> and <Sort>, but not
> <MultiPg>.
> 
>   Msg 00010
>       Subject: Re: Bug in DM using long records? 
>       Date: Thu, 5 Jan 1995 16:07:22 +0600 
>   Msg 00007
>       Subject: Bug in DM using long records? 
>       Date: Thu, 5 Jan 1995 21:21:12 GMT 
>   Msg 00008
>       Subject: Re: Bug in DM using long records? 
>       Date: Thu, 5 Jan 95 14:42:52 MST 
>   Msg 00012
>       Subject: Re: Bug in DM using long records? 
>       Date: Fri, 6 Jan 95 14:03:20 MST 
>
> The original question (Msg 00007) occurs at the lowest index number and
> the earliest time, but some other message has been picked as the top of
> the thread.

The output looks correct, technically.  The date
"Thu, 5 Jan 1995 16:07:22 +0600" is older than
"Thu, 5 Jan 1995 21:21:12 GMT".  That is, you actually received
the response to a message before the original message.  This can
happen depending on how mail gets routed.

Message numbers only indicate the order mhonarc process messages.
Consider it the "raw" message order.

A thing to try is modifying that DATEFIELDS resource to key off
a different date field of the message header?

--ewh