Gnus threads too many articles together

Gnus threads too many articles together

[John Haman]

(I tried to send this email to info-gnus-english@gnu.org, but it may have failed)

Everyday I get an email from my bank saying what my account balance is. These are all different emails, but Gnus puts them all in one thread, I think because they have the same subject. If I go into my bank group and insert old articles, I get


O  Jan 24, 2023     Alliant Alerts      0  Account Balance Notification
O  Jan 24, 2023     Alliant Alerts      0   ╰─► 
O  Jan 25, 2023     Alliant Alerts      0     ╰─► 
O  Jan 27, 2023     Alliant Alerts      0       ╰─► 
O  Jan 30, 2023     Alliant Alerts      0         ╰─► 
O  Jan 31, 2023     Alliant Alerts      0           ╰─►


I don't know the most informative way to ask this question, but is there a way to make Gnus just thread distinct conversations together (like Outlook.)

I'd like to not disable threads entirely.

-- 
Dr. John Haman
Maryland, USA

Re: Gnus threads too many articles together

[Andrew Cohen]

>>>>> "JH" == John Haman <mail@johnhaman.org> writes:

[...]

    JH> I don't know the most informative way to ask this question, but
    JH> is there a way to make Gnus just thread distinct conversations
    JH> together (like Outlook.)

Do you mean you want to NOT combine messages with the same subject into
a thread, but only those that are actually related?

‘gnus-summary-thread-gathering-function’
     Gnus gathers threads by looking at ‘Subject’ headers.  This means
     that totally unrelated articles may end up in the same “thread”,
     which is confusing.  An alternate approach is to look at all the
     ‘Message-ID’s in all the ‘References’ headers to find matches.
     This will ensure that no gathered threads ever include unrelated
     articles, but it also means that people who have posted with broken
     newsreaders won’t be gathered properly.  The choice is yours—plague
     or cholera:

     ‘gnus-gather-threads-by-subject’
          This function is the default gathering function and looks at
          ‘Subject’s exclusively.

     ‘gnus-gather-threads-by-references’
          This function looks at ‘References’ headers exclusively.

     If you want to test gathering by ‘References’, you could say
     something like:

          (setq gnus-summary-thread-gathering-function
                'gnus-gather-threads-by-references)


-- 
Andrew Cohen

Re: Gnus threads too many articles together

[John Haman]

>           (setq gnus-summary-thread-gathering-function
>                 'gnus-gather-threads-by-references)
>

Thanks, I'm going to test drive this setting for a while, and hopefully it will fix the threading weirdness.

-- 
Dr. John Haman
Maryland, USA

Re: Gnus threads too many articles together

[Eric S Fraga]

Check out gnus-thread-ignore-subject; setting this to t should do what
you want.

-- 
Eric S Fraga via gnus (Emacs 30.0.50 2023-09-14) on Debian 12.1

Re: Gnus threads too many articles together

[Pankaj Jangid]

Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> writes:

> Check out gnus-thread-ignore-subject; setting this to t should do what
> you want.

That's interesting. I was relying only on
'gnus-summary-thread-gathering-function' and
'gnus-thread-sort-functions' only. But the docstring of
'gnus-thread-ignore-subject' says this,

    Threads that are split because the subject changes will still be
    sorted as if they were part of the same thread, and
    ‘gnus-thread-sort-functions’ will not apply to these split
    threads.

Thanks for sharing this.