How can I remove an email from a conversation thread?
Collaborators often use "Reply to" a prior message when beginning a new topic. This makes locating the new message difficult later, because in appears under an unrelated conversation thread. Is there a way to remove a message from an existing thread, so that it can become the first message in a new conversation?
Chosen solution
I have played around with this for a while now and have received confusing results. Sometimes, deleting the contents of the References header does remove a message from a thread, sometimes not. In other cases, modifying all the References by e.g. adding a digit to the beginning of the string works, other times it doesn't. By editing the full source, one can modify additional headers, but so far I haven't discovered a consistent method.
There's more information on threading here:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Stop_threading_by_subject
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To unlink a message from a thread, you need to modify the In-Reply-To header, and this can be done with the help of this add-on:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/header-tools-lite/
http://chrisramsden.vfast.co.uk/3_How_to_install_Add-ons_in_Thunderbird.html
At the same time, you can modify the Subject to reflect the new content.
Your help worked very well to append a message to an existing conversation thread. I simply added the message id of a conversation message to the "reply-to" and "Reference" section of the message to be moved to the thread. But deleting those sections in a message that is part of a thread does not move it from the thread into an unthreaded spot in the message list, where I can cause it to begin a new thread.
I think I do not understand the significance of some of the header information that your tool reveals.
Chosen Solution
I have played around with this for a while now and have received confusing results. Sometimes, deleting the contents of the References header does remove a message from a thread, sometimes not. In other cases, modifying all the References by e.g. adding a digit to the beginning of the string works, other times it doesn't. By editing the full source, one can modify additional headers, but so far I haven't discovered a consistent method.
There's more information on threading here:
Thank you for your tries. The obvious way forward for me is to enforce the use of threads properly by getting people to start a new topic instead of appending new topics onto old topics just because they do not want to retype an email address.