From: Jesse Rosenthal <jrosenthal@jhu.edu>
To: Jani Nikula <jani@nikula.org>,
	Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>, notmuch@notmuchmail.org
Subject: Re: Getting the right root mail of the thread
In-Reply-To: <87zjpmoqtz.fsf@nikula.org>
References: <5274f93e254b5_6de7f51e7849@nysa.notmuch>
	<87zjpmoqtz.fsf@nikula.org>
User-Agent: Notmuch/0.16+119~g1eecfbd (http://notmuchmail.org) Emacs/24.1.1
	(i686-pc-linux-gnu)
Date: Sun, 03 Nov 2013 15:35:59 -0500
Message-ID: <87k3gprzo0.fsf@jhu.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Precedence: list

Jani Nikula <jani@nikula.org> writes:
> I think it's actually worse than what your example demonstrates. It's
> the subject of the newest/oldest *matching* message that gets used. In
> your example, the first/last messages in the thread apparently match
> your query.

The behavior is there because subjects frequently change in long
threads, and this allows the subject to refer to the most recent unread
message (if we're sorting in the default order). The 
reason I requested and wrote in this behavior five years ago or so (my
only c contribution ever) was that numerous business associates would
keep email lists by replying and changing the subject. This is *very*
common outside of programming circles. Even in programming circles,
subjects frequently change on mailing list (with a "[was: ...]"
appended). 

The current behavior can be annoying, but the old behavior could make
the MUA quite unusable in a number of circumstances. (And yes, an MUA
that fails on reading mail from senders with bad emailing practices is
unusable for me.)

Maybe there should be a "show original subject" toggle? That wouldn't be
too hard, though it would require another call to the library and
regenerating the search results.