Enhancement: threaded or chat view

[dumblob]

Are there any plans to support threaded or chat view of messages?

[jasonmunro]

I would love to support that in the future. Many IMAP servers provide the THREAD extension to pre-sort message lists by thread, and Gmail's IMAP implementation provides thread ids that can be used to do something similar. In the past I have written purely client side thread support, and it's .. messy and slow when using standard IMAP commands - so when we get to this it will likely hinge on the IMAP servers support for the THREAD extension.

[dumblob]

Great news (I'm particularly interested in IMAP, no POP3). Are there any blockers for such module?

[jasonmunro]

No blockers really, just the time to write the code :) I used to have IMAP THREAD extension support in our IMAP client library, but when I refactored that library for use in this project I ripped it out. it was just really terrible :) (I can say that with conviction since I wrote it!)

The first place to start is to build support for sending THREAD commands and parsing their responses in the IMAP lib. From what I remember parsing a thread response is not unlike parsing a bodystructure response (nested data structure), except it's quite a bit simpler than the latter. From there it's just a matter of wiring it up to the UI and resolving a few minor issues around that. After that I think it would be neat to leverage any enhancements the Gmail protocol extensions provide.

[dumblob]

No blockers really, just the time to write the code :)

Understood - same here :(

After that I think it would be neat to leverage any enhancements the Gmail protocol extensions provide.

Is there any good and up-to-date reference emphasizing the differences to standard IMAP?

[jasonmunro]

There is a nice summary here:
https://developers.google.com/gmail/imap_extensions

Our IMAP lib already has limited support for some of these protocol extensions (maybe all of them, I honestly don't recall exactly), but we are not acting on the additional information in any way yet.

[marclaporte]

I wonder if adding support only for JMAP would make it easier?
https://github.com/jmapio/jmap/blob/master/spec/mail/thread.mdown
https://github.com/jmapio/jmap/blob/master/server-guide/jmap-server-guide.mdown#2-threads

In Cyrus "Conversations (Server-side threading with reduced protocol chatter for mobile or other high-latency clients)" is "Required for JMAP support" Source: https://github.com/cyrusimap/cyrus-imapd/blob/master/docsrc/imap/download/packagers.rst

Related: roundcube/roundcubemail#499

[marclaporte]

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5256

[marclaporte]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversation_threading

[marclaporte]

https://meta.discourse.org/t/introducing-chat-threads/270613

[marclaporte]

https://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html

[marclaporte]

Sorting: "If the IMAP server supports the IMAP extension SORT (most mainstream servers do) enable this feature in SquirrelMail's configuration. In general, always enable this option if your server supports it since it's way faster than sorting in SquirrelMail, and may prevent problems for end users with very large mailboxes."

Threading: "SquirrelMail also allows using server-side threading if the IMAP server supports it. This option offers the end users to view the message list in a thread view"

Source: https://www.squirrelmail.org/docs/admin/admin-6.html#ss6.3

[marclaporte]

This is the oldest still open issue, and currently number 3 by reactions:
https://github.com/cypht-org/cypht/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+sort%3Areactions

We are currently increasing our development capacity/velocity, so we'll focus on quick wins for a few more months, and then come back for some more tricky ones like this.