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Multiple answers in response

Mail user agents typically display message flows by combining messages together according to the In-Reply-To and References header fields that contain the message IDs of other messages. Although mail usually only responds to one other message, it may happen that one message answers several others. The standard allows multiple entries in both fields. What can I expect when I send an email that is referenced or is "In response to multiple identifiers" in this way?

  • Is this good to do?
  • Does this confuse widespread MUAs?
  • Is there a common point on how to display such a message in threaded?
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The "In-Reply-To:" field will contain the contents of the "Message-ID:" field of the message to which it is a response ("parent message"). If there is more than one parent message, the "In-Reply-To:" field will contain the contents of all the parent fields "Message-ID:". If none of the parent messages has a "Message-ID:" field, then the new message will not have a "In-Reply-To:" field.

Technically, this MAY be the reason you are responding to multiple emails, and it would be correct to place multiple message identifiers in the In-Reply-To header. I can’t think of any program that actually supports this. As for the MUA, they don’t care about the delivery that the MUA cares about, these are the To, Cc, Bcc headers.

The In-Reply-To header and the References header will control the display of the streams. Not sure if any email clients will have problems processing multiple In- response headers. In 99% of cases, the In- response header will only have one message identifier. So its executable mail applications will not support it. However, they will support additional reference records. And that should not be a problem.

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