From: Bruce Lilly (blilly@erols.com)
Date: Sun Feb 01 2004 - 15:38:19 CST
Russ Allbery wrote:
> I agree with Bruce, with the caveat that I do believe it is important to
> tell client authors *somewhere* about the "Re: " convention and make sure
> they're aware that basically every existing news client uses it and that
> it, while not a protocol issue, is widely expected behavior. While it may
> be a display issue, it's a display issue that a lot of people expect.
>
> But this need not be in the standards document. I think it's a perfectly
> reasonable thing to explain in the GNKSA document.
There are a couple of things that need to be made clear:
1. presence or absence of "Re:" means nothing. A message with or w/o "Re:"
might or might not be a reply. This is not a protocol issue, but we
need to make it clear to implementors that it is not a protocol issue.
2. Prefacing an existing Subject field with "Re: " is NOT a simple matter
of inserting the string "Re: ". It is necessary to ensure that if the
modified Subject field contains any encoded-words, that those words are
on lines with length no greater than 76 octets (in accordance with RFC
2047). This *is* a protocol issue. Likewise w.r.t. recommended line
length and mandatory line length limits in the absence of encoded-words.
Beyond those, it's certainly possible to cover other non-protocol topics;
the silliness of "Re: Re: " and "Re^2:", "FW", "Fwd", "Auto:", etc.