Breaking a really long thread

[David Bremner]

David Mazieres <dm-list-email-notmuch at scs.stanford.edu> writes:


> Is there any way to break an existing thread (so as to start over with a
> smaller thread), or otherwise to tweak the threading rules so that a
> particular References header gets ignored.

Currently there is no way to do this, as threads are "stateless"
i.e. created on the fly by _notmuch_create_thread based only on
immutable mail data.  We'd have to be willing to dump/restore any
threading hints we added to the database, but we're already headed down
that path with the libconfig stuff anyway.  Something we _almost_ have
the infrastructure in place for would be to blacklist a particular
reference (e.g. by regex) by storing the blacklist as database
metadata. That would solve your particular problem, although I'm not
sure it it's general enough. Keeping global state for all thread
breaking sounds a bit clunky.

> It's annoyingly slow to open
> a thread with 10,000 messages just to read one SMS.  I'm almost tempted
> to mangle the messages on delivery and remove the References header
> before notmuch sees them, but it would be nice to have a cleaner
> solution, as there are other situations in which one might want to
> "reset" a really long thread.

Like this thread ;).