Good evening,
I appreciate the feature that allows me to organize my emails by threads or conversations. However, I am struggling to identify the specific criterion by which it performs the grouping.
Is there a method available to select a specific field for grouping, such as the Subject?
I usually opt to replicate emails along with their attachments, rather than saving the attachments independently. Nevertheless, I would prefer if these replicates (or all emails) could have a date at the beginning of the name. This currently breaks the grouped thread while having “Re:” or “Fwd:” at the beginning does not.
In order to achieve this, I believe I would need to utilize the date from the initial email in the thread and somehow apply the same for all subsequent emails to have them named the same way. However, as far as I comprehend, automating this process for later emails is challenging and not easily feasible.
Does anyone have suggestions on how to address this issue?
However, I am struggling to identify the specific criterion by which it performs the grouping.
Threading emails is not a precise process. In fact, it’s one of the more difficult things to do as there has been no standard mechanism to determine what relates to what. Add to that a variety of proprietary implementations from Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc. and billions of non-conforming legacy emails dating back to the 1970’s and you’ll see why it’s only a best guess operation.
Is there a method available to select a specific field for grouping, such as the Subject?
No, this is not controllable.
In theory, there are “In-Reply-To” headers pointing back to the original e-mail. In practice, this works more or less reliably.
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I see 
Thanks for your input so far.
Next thing I’m going to try is to remove any prefixes like “Re:”, “AW:” and so on with help of regex-based smart rules, which hopefully leaves me with somewhat “normalized” Names for Mails with the same “subject”. This should allow me to group those Threads.
Not quite happy with that workaround though
Do you use the email archiving option for threading (see Preferences > Files > Email) or the sorting (see menu View > Sort)? The sorting isn’t limited to emails (e.g. useful for certain RSS feeds too) and just uses the name.
Well I’ve activated the E-Mail archiving Option (which does not have any visible effect when turned on vs. off) and I’m using the Sorting Option (which groups conversations by name).
What effect should I be seeing with the E-Mail archiving Option?
The option creates real groups for the threads while archiving and uses the information of the email headers, not the name.