From: John Stanley (stanley@peak.org)
Date: Thu Apr 01 2004 - 20:00:54 CST
Forrest J. Cavalier III (mibsoft@epix.net):
>John, is <Pine.LNX.4.53.0404011048180.30055@a.shell.peak.org>
>your idea of a April Fool's joke?
No, that looks like a perfectly good message id to me. What do you think
the problem with it is?
>I notice your message had no "Re:" in the Subject, and no References
>header.
You are very, ummm, noticing. Alert. Yes, that's the word. What is your
point?
>I have to laugh that this undermines arguments I see you have made.
In what way? I think it supports the claim that "Re: " present or absent
tells you nothing at all. You caught the fact that the message was a
followup to something else, so I guess "Re: " not being present didn't
break anything at all.
Being the alert fellow you are, you might notice that this is not news,
where the References header is mandatory, but an email client, where
References is only a SHOULD. Of course, this requires the message id of
the parent to be available, which it is not. I cannot generate a header
for which I have no information, or are you implying I should enter a
bogus header just to fit your sensibilities of how mail should operate?
>BTW, how many "decades old" is your e-mail client?
I don't know. If you look in the message id you are concerned about, you'd
find the version number of pine. Is 4.53 "decades old"? I don't think so.
I didn't write it, I just use it.
>Or did some gateway strip that header?
I don't know what gateways betwixt me and thee have done; I suspect that
since there wasn't a message id of the parent available, and I didn't
enter the References header by hand, that the answer is "no", but there
might be a gateway that does something like that.
>Or are you just being a jerk
I'm debating a issue in a proposed news standard. I'm sorry if not
agreeing with you makes me a "jerk", but thanks for keeping this above the
level of personal insult.
Henry Spencer (henry@spsystems.net):
>> A very nice condemnation of the "Re: " hack, I will note.
>Only if you ignore that "in the Netnews environment" part. If "Re: " is
>defined to be meaningful in news, there's no conflict.
In which RFC regarding news is "Re: " defined to mean something? Since
the answer is "nowhere", then software SHOULD NOT attempt to interpret it.
Since the Subject header is not defined to carry such information in a
netnews environment, software SHOULD NOT attempt to interpret it. It's
defined to be "unstructured", that's how software should interpret it.