From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clerew.man.ac.uk)
Date: Wed Apr 30 2003 - 06:04:11 CDT
In <3EAEE0EC.3070307@Sonietta.blilly.com> Bruce Lilly <blilly@erols.com> writes:
>If the "Re: " hack is removed, i.e. Subject is truly unstructured
>and software authors are discouraged from prepending "Re: " while
>being required to use References, how exactly is interoperability
>affected?
Yes, but why do you want to remove a feature, which is widely used in both
News and Email, which is useful (when scanning down a list of incoming
messages), which users worldwide have become used to (and mostly use
correctly), and which is recognized by much existing software (both large
elaborate user agents, and ad hoc user's scripts)?
And you want to replace it by a feature (the References header) which is
not usually displayed by reading agents, and which is inconvenient for
users to use and understand (though it is fine for automatic processing,
which it was intended for).
Far better to document the _correct_ way to use it (which 95% of current
agents already seem to get right).
>1. Removing "Re: " does NOT necessarily give a "base subject":
> Subject: Re: is an anachronism
> is not a follow-up.
So? Most current agents will sort it incorrectly, and deservedly so. We
are not writing standards for the benefit of people who deliberately write
awkward cases that are not going to happen in real life.
>> IOW,
>> we do not want to impose a mess such as is proposed in
>> draft-ietf-imapext-sort-11.txt, which endeavours to cope with every
>> variant of "Re" that has ever appeared anywhere.
>That's not being suggested here.
But it is what people will try and do if we do not give clear guidance as
to what is "correct" and what is not.
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Email: chl@clerew.man.ac.uk Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5