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Can I tell Thunderbird my own rules as to what I consider to be a "conversation?"

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  • Last reply by Matt

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To be specific, to identify "conversations," can I tell Thunderbird to completely disregard subject lines, and identify them by sender alone?

By default, Thunderbird identifies conversations by subject line (and sender). But I'd rather have my conversations identified by sender, and sender alone. To clarify, this would mean that any email from (and possibly to) a specific sender would be part of the same conversation, regardless of what the subject line is.

(This could potentially achieve something similar to "grouping emails by sender, and sorting them by date," which is another question I asked in this forum)

Is it possible to make Thunderbird conversations behave like this somehow? Maybe with a plugin? Thanks.

To be specific, to identify "conversations," can I tell Thunderbird to completely disregard subject lines, and identify them by sender alone? By default, Thunderbird identifies conversations by subject line (and sender). But I'd rather have my conversations identified by sender, and sender alone. To clarify, this would mean that any email from (and possibly to) a specific sender would be part of the same conversation, regardless of what the subject line is. (This could potentially achieve something similar to "grouping emails by sender, and sorting them by date," which is another question I asked in this forum) Is it possible to make Thunderbird conversations behave like this somehow? Maybe with a plugin? Thanks.

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The support document for threading is here https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/message-threading-thunderbird

MozillaZine has more detailed information on hidden preferences and their effect. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Stop_threading_by_subject

I appear to have disappeared down a rabbit hole on threading. I am still looking at the internals of sorting particularly. So that will have to be your lot for now as I know nothing more after a couple of hours. But I will link some of the stuff I have been looking at.

Other references https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86845#c74 https://wiki.mozilla.org/MailNews:Message_Threading https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=273497 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=277190

source search on the "bycustom" sort https://searchfox.org/comm-central/search?q=byCustom&path=&case=false&regexp=false

Source which appear to indicate multiple column selection should work https://searchfox.org/comm-central/source/mail/base/content/threadPane.js But I can't make it work, so perhaps I an doing it wrong.