From: J.B.Moreno (planb@newsreaders.com)
Date: Sun Feb 01 2004 - 23:47:44 CST
On 2/1/04 4:38 PM, Bruce Lilly at <blilly@erols.com> wrote:
> 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.
It does mean something -- except in the case of software mistakes, in text
groups it's absence means that a person manually entered the Subject. This
is useful information.
It's not 100% reliable, but if that's to be the criteria, then none of the
headers mean anything, as they all get screwed up at times.
-- J.B. Moreno