msgthr - container-agnostic, non-recursive message threading

Pure Ruby message threading based on the algorithm described by JWZ in <www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html> and used in countless mail and news readers; but with some features removed and improved flexibility:

  • Message format-agnostic, not limited to email or NNTP; but even appropriate for forums, blog comments, IM, etc. For mail and NNTP messages, that means you must extract the Message-ID and parse the References and In-Reply-To headers into an array yourself.

  • No recursion; all algorithms are non-recursive to avoid SystemStackError exceptions in deep message threads. Memory usage is bound by the number of lightweight containers needed to represent a thread.

  • No pruning of non-leaf ghosts. Readers are not shielded from deleted or lost messages. Equivalent to setting “hide_missing” to “no” in mutt.

  • No grouping by subject. This makes things ideal for short messages such as chat and status updates. For email, this encourages the use of proper client which set In-Reply-To or References headers. Equivalent to setting “strict_threads” to “yes” in mutt.

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    • Instead, messages with the same Subject can be grouped by a search engine. For email, this would be done using a mail search engine like notmuch or mairix.

Source code

Our Ruby 1.9.3+ compatible code is available via git, no C compiler or other dependencies are required:

git clone git://80x24.org/msgthr git clone 80x24.org/msgthr.git

Releases may be downloaded via RubyGems:

gem fetch [-v VERSION] msgthr

The code used in this Ruby library was originally derived from the Mail::Thread module for Perl 5.x:

metacpan.org/release/Mail-Thread

Contact

Feedback is welcome via plain-text mail (no HTML, images, etc). Please send comments, user/dev discussion, patches, bug reports, and pull requests to the open-to-all mailing list at:

[email protected]

No subscription will ever be required to post. Please Cc: all recipients as subscription will never be necessary.

Mailing list archives are available via HTTPS and NNTP:

80x24.org/msgthr-public/ nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.lang.ruby.msgthr

You may optionally subscribe, but will never be required to:

[email protected]

This README is our homepage, we would rather be working on cool stuff day than worrying about the next browser vulnerability because CSS/JS/images are all too complicated for us.

RDoc API documentation in simple HTML is available at:

80x24.org/msgthr/rdoc/

Copyright

Copyright 2016-2017, all contributors (see git repo). License: GPL-2.0+ <www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.txt>

msgthr is copyrighted Free Software by all contributors, see logs in revision control for names and email addresses of all of them.

msgthr is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

msgthr is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, see www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.txt