From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clerew.man.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Jun 02 2003 - 11:16:17 CDT
In <Pine.LNX.4.44.0305271049450.10918-100000@localhost.localdomain> John Stanley <stanley@peak.org> writes:
>I guess I should give up saying this, but I'll try one more time.
>.... That precludes the sillyness of trying to
>tell people that their "pure subjects" MUST NOT start with "Re: ", but it
>DOES allow agents to do whatever it is they used to do with it.
There you have a point. If you encounter
Subject: Re: Re: foo
then you should be able to conlude that it was either produced by a buggy
followup agent, or it was deliberately created by a user - and to say he
MUST NOT create that may be going too far.
Interestingly, one of the differences between my two suggested texts is
that the first (syntactic) one does make that prohibition, and the second
(verbiage) one does not.
Anyway, is is clear that the great majority of those who have responded on
this list want a proper description of the "Re: " convention in USEFOR.
So, in a couple of days time (I have just returned from a week away, and
am still processing my backlog) I shall produce another text for you,
following the discussion. It will be based on my second text.
>Charles Lindsey (chl@clerew.man.ac.uk):
>>2. MUST NOT add a "Re: " when there is one there already.
>Why not? Nothing breaks. I think the "ought" in RFC2822 is strong enough.
Yes, things do break. Much existing software that sorts articles by
Subject and other similar things assumes that coping with one "Re: " will
suffice.
>>5. Agents that choose to recognize "Re: " (for whatever purpose, but
>>sorting by Subject is the obvious example) need not bother with more than
>>a single "Re: ".
>Agents that choose to ignore the header specifically defined for the
>purpose of threading a discussion are on their own. They "need not bother"
>with ANY "Re: " in the subject, so telling them they need not bother with
>more than one is incorrect, since it implies they need to bother with one.
No, it just recognizes that many existing agents _choose_ to bother with
one.
-- 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