Make a new email subject

Question

When writing an application that sends emails based on certain events, I would like to enforce the rule that each of these emails starts a new “conversation”.

Mail systems such as Gmail, such as multicast emails, in “conversations”, so that messages A are considered a response to message B. There are many methods that they use to determine which message you reply, such as the Subject: header or the In-Reply-To header.

However, since automated emails usually sometimes use subject lines (for example, "Monitoring failure on the server foo.bar.com"), often the postal service will consider that this letter is actually a response to the previous message with the same message if they are not connected with friend. This can lead to confusion and potential customer flaws.

Is it possible (and if so, how) to signal in your message headers that this letter is NOT a response to any other, despite any possible similarities in the subject lines?

Since the email object itself is visible to the client, I would prefer to avoid stupidity as follows: "Subject: Automated reminder for $task [".md5sum(date())."]"

Answer 1

There really is no way to do this for all email systems. Even if you figure out how to get around this for Gmail, what about the messaging modes Mail.app, Thunderbird, and Outlook? Of course, each email client that supports this functionality determines how messages belong to this conversation in different ways.

Thus, it seems that most clients use a combination of sender, response, and subject. Gmail Web Client uses internal flow identifiers to more accurately track emails sent from the Web Client. Have you considered sending from different email addresses? For example, in Gmail, [e-mail] same as [e-mail] . Everything that was after + is deleted and ignored for the sake of mail routing, but I do not think that it was ignored when calculating the membership in the stream. I'm not sure if this addressing rule is specific to Gmail or if it is part of the standard.

Answer 2

Most email clients organize flows based on the following InReplyTo, References, Thread-Index (from Outlook) headers. Therefore, if you do not include those in your email message, I think that this will not be considered as part of any existing stream (unless the underlying stream subject is included).

Now GMail also takes the topic into account. Therefore, I think that if you want to change the subject line. You will have to experiment.

Answer 3

Although you can turn off threading in Gmail as a user, there is no way to tell them not to register an email sent to someone else.

Why not just add a date to the end? This way you will have slightly more easily accessible information, and you should not have a whole bunch of old messages being dragged as part of the stream.