Manipulating References & In-Reply-To

[Scott Balmos]

Hi all,

I'm building a web forum system on top of Cyrus. Some people apparently 
want a message editing system, and possibly thread splitting / merging 
abilities.

For message editing, I think it's okay if the original message is 
deleted, and then replaced with the edited message contents, via an IMAP 
post operation, that has the exact same headers as the original message 
(especially References & In-Reply-To). Is this a more-or-less okay train 
of thought? I know one of the RFCs says that a Message ID is supposed to 
be absolutely unique. But for in-place editing, I really don't want to 
think of the processing load it would take to replace the edited message 
and also change the In-Reply-To and References headers of all of that 
message's child messages.

Along the same lines, for message splitting, does Cyrus do its threading 
by In-Reply-To or References? What about the usual mail clients? Again, 
I'm trying to figure out whether I can split the message thread by 
editing one message, or if I have to remove a whole string of References 
message IDs from all of the split thread's messages.

Any comments or suggestions for handling this?

Thanks!

--
Scott Balmos

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