Ximian Evolution Sorting by Thread

If one use the thread-sorting of e-mails, he may fall into the problem that Ximian/Novell Evolution does follow the In-Reply-To: header to understand that two mails are of the same thread. Microsoft Outlook has a different way to do it [1], and it breaks Evolution's sorting. To circumvent this, just ask Evolution to consider threads based on the subject [2]. To actually do it:
  1. shut down Evolution ( killev or evolution --force-shutdown , depending on the version)
  2. backup ~/evolution/config.xmldb (or the whole ~evolution directory)
  3. edit ~/evolution/config.xmldb and set thread_subject to 1 [3]

[1] not RFC-compliant, of course [2] this may give you other troubles, though, like in the case of automated e-mails continuously appearing at the end of your folder because the same subject is there [3] should probably be better to use GConf to change this option, if possible
This article was first written in October 2003 for
the BeezNest technical website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/82)