From: Jonathan Duddington
Subject: Threads display
Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2000 23:00:00
Source: Docs


Message "threading" is where articles are displayed or found according to their relation to other articles, as given in the "References: " or "In-Reply-To: " lines in their headers.

Threads Display
===============

The "Threads" sorting type can be used to display articles by "threads".  This is similar to the "Newsgroups" sorting type but:

a.  Articles within a thread are indented to display their relationships.  An article is indented one level more than its parent.  (The parent being the article to which this one is a reply).

b.  A "thread" can contain messages which have different Subject titles, i.e. if the Subject changes during the course of the thread.

Although the articles are arranged in a hierarchy, selecting an article and applying an operation such as a status change will apply the operation only to the individual selected article and not also to its descendants.  If you want to apply an operation to a branch of the hierarchy, use CTRL-A to select the required articles.  CTRL-A will select the current article and its descendants.

You can toggle threading on and off in an article list by changing its sorting type between "Threads" and "Newsgroups", using the Sorting menu in the article list button bar.

Threading may not work as well for Mail as it does for News, since some mail clients don't add a References: or In-Reply-To: header line when they send mail replies.  If an article does not have such a header line, or if its parent articles are not currently stored in Pluto, then it will appear at the left-most indentation level.

In some cases, the number of indentation levels can be large.  The
threaded article listing can be shifted to the left or right (i.e.
decreasing or increasing the indentation levels) by using CTRL-I and
CTRL-SHIFT-I respectively.


Number of Kept References
=========================

News articles may include many message-ids in the References: line in their message header.  Pluto's Preferences->News/mail->Keep_References option specifies how many of these it keeps in its index.  If you are short on memory, you can set this to 1 to reduce the size of the index, but this will mean that an article will no longer be linked to its more distant ancestors if its immediate parent is missing.

99 means keep the maximum number of references.  When this value is
changed, it will only affect newly arriving messages, unless the
Misc->Compile_References_Index function is used from Pluto's iconbar menu
to apply it to previously stored articles.


References Button
=================

The Article Viewer window includes a "References" button.

This shows a menu of:

a.  The parent references of the article (i.e. the articles to which this is a reply).  These are shown with their Date and Author.  But if the article is not stored in Pluto, then just a message-id is shown.

b.  "Siblings" - articles which are also replies to the same immediate parent.  The current article is shown in the Siblings list with a tick beside it.

c.  "Replies" - these are articles which are replies to the current article.

If an article in the menu is a Log Copy of a message that you've sent, this is indicated by a ¦ (bar) symbol to the left of the Author.

You can move between articles by clicking on an entry in the References menu.  This will replace the current article in the Article Viewer by the selected one.  If the selected article is not in the article list from which the Article Viewer was originally opened, then it's opened into an Additional Article Viewer. 

You can use Shift-click to open an article from the menu into a new Additional Article Viewer.

If an article is not stored in Pluto (i.e. it's shown in the menu only by its message-id) then if clicked on, Pluto will send a URL request to the browser to look it up in Deja-news.

The articles which are shown in the References menu may have been found in any of Pluto's Boxes.  This can include the Bin box if the article has recently been deleted.


Message-ids in the Text
=======================

Clicking with the Menu button on a message-id in a text window (eg. an "In article..." attribution or the References: line in the message header) will open the URL menu.  This includes choices to open the corresponding article in an Additional Article Viewer, or to look it up in Deja-news.

