From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clerew.man.ac.uk)
Date: Fri May 02 2003 - 11:00:31 CDT
In <p06001004bad7387ab2b8@[216.43.25.67]> Pete Resnick <presnick@qualcomm.com> writes:
>There are two separate questions about what we should be documenting
>with regard to "Re: ". One is whether we should say it SHOULD be
>prepended to subjects. The other is whether we should say that it
>MUST NOT be anything other than "Re :".
Actually, the really important thing to say is that you MUST NOT say
"Re: Re: ...".
>When you sort by subject, you very much want "Re: Differences between
>RFC 2822 and Usefor" to sort together with "Differences between RFC
>2822 and Usefor", even though some people will use one form and some
>people will use the other form. Therefore, it is common practice for
>clients to ignore "Re: " at the beginning of the subject, because it
>is common practice for people to prepend "Re: " at the beginning of
>subjects. It is current common practice WHETHER OR NOT WE THINK IT IS
>STUPID.
Yes, that is essentially it. But OTOH you don't want to put implementors
to have to bother with "Re: Re: Differences between RFC 2822 and Usefor",
or "Re[2]: ..." or other horrors (because current practice seems to be
that you only ever write one "Re: "). Which is why I do not like that IMAP
sorting draft, which tries to enshrine all those extra cases into a
standard. But IMAP is not my problem, at the moment.
>Given that this is dicussing the contents of a clearly unstructured
>field, I think this belongs in USAGE and not in the syntax document.
I am not entirely convinced of that. However, the time to discuss it is
when we come to do the USEAGE split of that chapter (which will actually be
quite soon now, since that split is my next job).
-- 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