Is there any open source tool that automatically 'detects' email threading like Gmail?

Posted by Chris W. on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Chris W.
Published on 2010-03-05T23:31:38Z Indexed on 2010/03/08 14:51 UTC
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email-parsing

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For instance, if the original message (message 1) is...

Hey Jon,
Want to go get some pizza?
-Bill

And the reply (message 2) is...

Bill,
Sorry, I can't make lunch today.
Jonathon Parks, CTO Acme Systems

On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 4:43 PM, Bill Waters wrote:

> Hey John,
> Want to go get some pizza?
> -Bill

In Gmail, the system (a) detects that message 2 is a reply to message 1 and turns this into a 'thread' of sorts and (b) detects where the replied portion of the message actually is and hides it from the user. (In this case the hidden portion would start at "On Wed, Feb..." and continue to the end of the message.)

Obviously, in this simple example it would be easy to detect the "On <Date>, <Name> wrote:" or the ">" character prefixes. But many email systems have many different style of marking replies (not to mention HTML emails). I get the feeling that you would have to have some damn smart string parsing algorithms to get anywhere near how good GMail's is.

Does this technology already exist in an open source project somewhere? Either in some library devoted to this exclusively or perhaps in some open source email client that does similar message threading?

Thanks.

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