VM User's Manual. Node: Threading

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11.1: Threading

A thread is a group of messages that are either related by subject or that have a common ancestor. Threading is the process of determining the relationship between such messages and displaying them so that those relationship are evident.

To enable and disable threading, type C-t (vm-toggle-threads-display. In the summary buffer related messages are grouped together and the subject part of the summary listings of messages are indented to show hierarchical relationships. Parent messages are displayed before their children and children are indented a default two spaces to the right for each level of descendence from their ancestors. The amount of indentation per level is controlled by the variable vm-summary-thread-indent-level.

Message relationships are discovered by examining References, In-Reply-To, and Subject headers. The first two headers are more reliable sources of information but not all mailers provide them. If you don't want VM to use Subject headers, set the variable vm-thread-using-subject to nil.

If you want VM to always display messages using threads, you should set the default value of the variable vm-summary-show-threads non-nil in your VM init file. Exmaple:

(setq-default vm-summary-show-threads t)

Do not use setq, as this will only set the value of the variable in a single buffer. Once you've started VM you should not change the value of this variable. Rather you should use C-t to control the thread display.

Note that threading is really a specialized form of sorting, and so the value of the variable vm-move-messages-physically applies.

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