Viewing answers to one's nntp posts in Thunderbird

[Tim]

On Tue, 2009-10-06 at 08:42 +0500, gilpel at altern.org wrote:
> I check the headers and the References field is in the form of
> 
> 08nmii94i230 at newsprovider.com

The message ID may come from the posting client, or the hosting server
(it may add IDs where none are present, or replace them with its own,
which can be a right pain).

> There is no mention of who the poster is. So, the newsreader would
> have to check every message to see who posted it. Lots of work!

It's a message ID (supposedly unique per message, but not guaranteed).
And it's indexing should already be tracking them, as messages are added
to the database.  Actions you do on messages should be working on its
index, and it's index should be efficient (doesn't mean the client will
actually work that way, or be good at it, though).

> I also saw that the References field is not always present.

Yes, well, certain crap clients completely screw up message headers when
they post follow-ups.  Posters using them tended not to get very far
with replies.  Not just because they pissed off the respondents, but
because their message disappeared into the pile of a thousand others
unsorted messages, outside of the threads that the respondents were
watching.

The same thing happens on mailing lists, for the same reasons.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.  I
read messages from the public lists.