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Very bad email grouping/threading for CodeReview mails in Gmail
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Description

Just sticking this here before we forget about it:

<p858snake> meh thats not as much as a pain as the whole grouping thing since the subject style change in cr
<Reedy> p858snake, RoanKattouw_away wanted to do the change to stop it grouping for him...
<Reedy> (and presumably others)
<p858snake> stop it grouping? it just started
<Reedy> Roan had it grouping on [Mediawiki]
<p858snake> i didn't, although admittedly i didn't comment all that much
<Reedy> hmm
<Reedy> hopefully
<Reedy> it should group on [MediaWiki r11111]
<Reedy> and keep all revision stuff on one
<p858snake> its grouped at least two differnt code tickets to gether under the one subject now

  • Reedy shrugs

<Reedy> I don't use gmail for that
<RoanKattouw> Reedy: It's *still* grouping stuff inappropriately :(
<Reedy> Boooooo
<p858snake> i wonder if we could fake the mailing list stuff for that to give them individual ids and group based on that since appropriately that is how mailman does it
<RoanKattouw> Then we should have IDs per rev
<RoanKattouw> So all comments on the same rev end up in the same thread
<RoanKattouw> That's actually a quite good idea
<p858snake> s/apparently/appropriately/
<p858snake> http://localhostr.com/files/vvz3gBJ/CR.png
<p858snake> although its strange that it was grouping them for some people before and not others
<Platonides> p858snake, there was some revision before a note about adding references to CR emails
<Platonides> I'd like having a fake from header, too
<p858snake> we should probably document this somewhere like in bz before we forget about it


Version: unspecified
Severity: minor

Details

Reference
bz26293

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Low.Nov 21 2014, 11:19 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz26293.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

Yes :(

I'd like to experiment with not using any brackets at all in the subject line. I fear Gmail may be confusing them for mailing list prefixes (currently, subject lines look like "[mediawiki-codereview] [MediaWiki r12345] Blah"), or maybe postfixing the revid instead of prefixing it.

Updated summary to clarify that CodeReview's emails are being horribly, *horribly* misgrouped/misthreaded at least in Gmail.

Gmail will group a bunch of things with this name pattern together as one conversation even though they all have different revision numbers in the subject:
'[MediaWiki r12345]: Follow-up changes'

Likewise, you'll see another thread like:
'[MediaWiki r12345]: Revision status changed'

It's kinda suck! Especially now that we've moved staff to Google Apps / Gmail, we probably have most of our code reviewers reading their mails on this system and it's playing hell with things, especially when a lot of new mails come through during a code review sprint.

Bumping up the priority on this.

(In reply to comment #3)

Updated summary to clarify that CodeReview's emails are being horribly,
*horribly* misgrouped/misthreaded at least in Gmail.

Gmail will group a bunch of things with this name pattern together as one
conversation even though they all have different revision numbers in the
subject:
'[MediaWiki r12345]: Follow-up changes'

Likewise, you'll see another thread like:
'[MediaWiki r12345]: Revision status changed'

It's kinda suck! Especially now that we've moved staff to Google Apps / Gmail,
we probably have most of our code reviewers reading their mails on this system
and it's playing hell with things, especially when a lot of new mails come
through during a code review sprint.

FINALLY someone feels my pain :D

Yeah basically what Gmail does now is group all 'Revision status changed' messages together (this is actually good because I don't care about those), all 'Follow-up changes' messages together, all 'New comment added' messages together and all 'New comment added and revision status changed' messages together. This happens until there are 61 messages in the group, after which it moves on to a new group. This is kind of terrible for reading because you're forced to read things in bulk.

bugs wrote:

Gmail sucks. Sometimes its threading works amazingly, sometimes it doesn't. I'm not really sure if there's anyway for us to fix this ourselves.

FWIF, the same issue happens with Bugzilla e-mails where the "New bug" e-mail sorts by itself and then all follow-up mails get sorted together separately, until the bug is renamed and it starts another group. It would be good if we could somehow tell Gmail that everything with the same bug number or the same revision should be sorted together, but I'm not sure if that's possible.

(In reply to comment #5)

Gmail sucks. Sometimes its threading works amazingly, sometimes it doesn't.
I'm not really sure if there's anyway for us to fix this ourselves.

FWIF, the same issue happens with Bugzilla e-mails where the "New bug" e-mail
sorts by itself and then all follow-up mails get sorted together separately,
until the bug is renamed and it starts another group.

That's reasonable though, because the messages it's grouping have identical subject lines. This is not the case for the CR e-mails we're sending, where the subject lines are subtly different (revision IDs). Yet Gmail groups them anyway, presumably because of the [brackets]. We can fix this by organizing the subject lines differently, presumably.

It would be good if we
could somehow tell Gmail that everything with the same bug number or the same
revision should be sorted together, but I'm not sure if that's possible.

There is an X-Reply-To header (or whatever it's called) that allows you to specify the ID of the message that this is a reply to (this requires you set IDs on messages as well, of course). Ashar wanted to experiment with this.

(In reply to comment #6)

There is an X-Reply-To header (or whatever it's called) that allows you to
specify the ID of the message that this is a reply to (this requires you set
IDs on messages as well, of course). Ashar wanted to experiment with this.

Yes. Supposedly as a prerequisite he had to enable the "sending an e-mail to yourself when you do something" process, which nobody liked and we backed out :)

Lowering priority on high priority bugs that have a low severity