From: Terje Bless (link@tss.no)
Date: Wed Oct 04 2000 - 15:33:29 CDT
On 03.10.00 at 22:13, Erland Sommarskog <sommar@algonet.se> wrote:
>It might be that you only use your mail bodies to send people unstructured
>ramblings, and put the points you make in the header. But I believe most
>people put information they want other people to see in the body.
Yes, if I want to add free-form text for the human recipient of the message
I'll add it in the body. But the header is where I put _structured_
information for the recipient's Reading Agent so it can deal, presumably
intelligently, with it. My newreader puts any Followup-To field in bold red
letters so's to notify me that followups won't go where I expected them to.
It can do similar things for PAM.
>>You not only wnat to tell him [it's been] posted and mailed, you also
>>want to tell him _where_ it's posted
>
>Nah, I assume that he knows which newsgruops he has posted to, and
>if he hasn't he has to blame himself.
You are forgetting the case of an original article that has been both
posted and mailed (I do this occationally); or of a followup that has been
posted to a different set of newsgroups and mailed; or of an email reply
that has also been posted; or a message that has been posted to a private
hierarchy carried only on a subset of servers (nntp:secnews.netscape.com).
The recipient cannot know any of these things unless s/he's told. The smart
way to do that is for the posting agent to insert this information in a
structured header field for automatic parsing by the recipient's user
agent. There is no good reason why the poster should insert this
information manually.
>>Read the Posted-and-Mailed draft. Among other things, it suggest a blurb
>>in the body until critical mass of support for the new header has been
>>reached and this is how it is implemented in YA-NW. It works very well.
>
>The blurb will need to be there forever.
No, I don't think so. Granted it won't go away soon, but it'll go away
eventually when critical mass has been achieved. The blurb is an optional
nicety anyway so it's not a problem to remove it before 100% penetration
has been achieved.
-- As a cat owner, I know this for a fact... Nothing says "I love you" like a decapitated gopher on your front porch.