From: J.B. Moreno (planb@newsreaders.com)
Date: Wed Jun 11 2003 - 01:24:00 CDT
On 6/9/03 4:21 PM, John Stanley at <stanley@peak.org> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 9 Jun 2003, Usenet News Support wrote:
>
>> I know you will continue to misunderstand this, "Re" is not only for the
>> convenience of software, it is useful to the humans using the software.
>
> I know you will continue to refuse to answer the question, but FOR WHAT
> PURPOSE that is NOT better served by the mandatory References header?
First and foremost -- an article with a Subject w/o "Re: " proclaims itself
as a "new" topic (where new means either no prior messages in thread
[References can do this] or no longer on the same topic as was indicated in
prior messages Subject [References can *not* do this]).
In practice this would be more useful if more people changed the Subject in
a more timely manner, but that doesn't mean it's useless today, it's not.
Subjects without 'Re: ' also say "I'm a person and I paid attention to the
Subject, and so the body of this message is more or less about what I say it
is, and hasn't yet drifted into a flame-war over what the best editor is
[gnus]".
For both of these things to happen the software *MUST* automatically add it
whenever responding, and leave it up to the user to override -- leaving it
off will cripple people's ability to deal with thread drift as they like.
-- J.B. Moreno