Persistence of custom headers within an email thread

Question

I this is probably a strange question, but I thought I'd go ahead and ask. Say, I send an email, using IMAP SMTP, through a special client. This client adds a few custom headers to the email message before sending it on its way. The recipient receives this email and responds to me directly (and maybe CC's a few people as well).

My question is this: Given the above example, would these X-headers persist throughout all the new messages within the thread?

One thing I can think of is the client would be aware of the original email message it sent. All subsequent responses to this email would have a "Reply-To" header whose value equals the "Message-Id" of the previous email. I don't see why I couldn't crawl up these thread of replies until I get to the original message sent by the client, thereby deriving the original custom headers.

Maybe I'm over-thinking this. Any suggestions? :)

Answer 1

A message reply does not necessarily contain anything of the original message. The MUA is likely to suggest a modified (e.g. prepended with "Re:") version of the original subject, and obviously the addresses are utilised for appropriate defaults as well. None of the other content of the message forms part of the reply (unless the sender deliberately includes it, as with quoting or forwarding). Any X- headers that you have in your message will certainly not be included in the reply (unless you have control over that MUA).

However, your plan of tracking the original message is certainly feasible: see Section 3.6.4 of RFC 5322. Every message should (not must) have a Message-ID header, and should have In-Reply-To and References headers when appropriate.

The "Message-ID:" field contains a single unique message identifier. The "References:" and "In-Reply-To:" fields each contain one or more unique message identifiers, optionally separated by [whitespace].

In-Reply-To is mention to identify the message (or messages) that is (are) being replied to, while References identifies the entire thread of conversation. The References header is meant to contain the entire contents of the References header of the message being replied to, so you only need the last message to identify the entire thread.

Note that In-Reply-To and Reply-To are not the same thing (the latter specifies the address that the sender wishes replies to be sent to).

Assuming that you have the original message, then you should be able to use the References header of any reply to identify the original message. Not every MUA will handle References or In-Reply-To correctly, but most will.

Answer 2

As far as I know, there's no reason to think any email client would propagate any header lines it doesn't understand. Most will preserve the subject (usually adding "Re: " if necessary) and derive their "To: " and "Cc: " lines from the previous message's headers, but that's about it. I suppose some (but not all) will generate an "In-Reply-To" line, but that's as far as it goes.

Your idea of having a client crawl back through the thread looking for specific headers sounds like it might be do-able, but you'd have to write your own email client if you want that feature, and you'd still be blocked by the fact that not all email clients preserve message threading in any way.