automatically splitting conversations

[Arnd Kohrs <kohrs@acm.org>]

Hi,

I usually keep all my mail (other than mailing lists and archives) in
one folder.

However, sometimes it occurs that I want to keep some activities in
dedicated groups.  Examples are:

- discussions with a small group of friends on a particular subject (not
  the header!)
- mail exchanged for various job-related or personal projects.
- mail exchanged for online auction transactions

AFAIK, splitting these activities to other groups than my regular
mailbox, cannot be achieved automatically. 

Actually, I would want to declare something which corresponds
semantically to the following:

¨Split all the INCOMING mail, which refers to a given PARENT mail or group of
mails, in s DEDICATED folder.¨

In order to implement this there are some possibilities that I can
think of:

[Dirty Hack]
- when sending a mail from a DEDICATED folder, this folder name is
  encoded in the message-id of the outgoing mail.  All the responses
  will carry the information in the references header, and a splitting
  rule can be specified which identifies references with encoded folder
  names and splits it accordingly.

[Complex Hack]
- the previous scheme fails in the case when a thread was initiated by
  someone else, then manual interaction is necessary.  A better method
  would be, that splitting would check for incoming messages if they are
  descendents of any of the messages contained in the dedicated folder.
  This would of course be computational complex, but sometimes very
  convenient for the user:
  - the user identifies a discussion thread
  - he creates a dedicated group
  - and customizes it thus it received all descendents of contained
    mails via group-split.

Before I try to implement such functionality I just wanted to poll on this
list, if others think that it would be useful. Or even better, maybe it
is possible to achieve such a behavior with the existing means.  On the
other hand, how could this be best implemented?  

Cheers,
Arnd.
-- 
Arnd Kohrs  -  Institut Eurecom - http://www.eurecom.fr/~kohrs
              
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