From: Bruce Lilly (blilly@erols.com)
Date: Mon Feb 02 2004 - 18:26:30 CST
J. B. Moreno wrote:
> On 2/2/04 5:27 AM, Bruce Lilly at <blilly@erols.com> wrote:
>
>
>>>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.
>>
>>The Subject field of this message does not begin with "Re: ". The Subject
>>field was *NOT* entered manually.
>
>
> It is also (A) a binary, and (B) mailed to a mailing list, not posted to a
> newsgroup, (C) missing the References header, so it's the start of a new
> thread, and finally (D) you're simply wrong, I assume this Subject
> construction is done in order to show that it contains a file, if this
> hadn't been the case, it'd just be a software mistake. If I give you the
> name of a newsreader that doesn't include the References header, will you
> then advocate removing it from the standard?
It wasn't binary, was generated by a combined news/mail UA (and could
just as easily have been posted to a newsgroup, or sent to a mail->news
gateway). Yes, it was missing a References field.
This message has one, and has a Subject field that does not begin with "Re: "
and was not manually entered.
> I could restate what it means so that it covers this case too, but given the
> above I don't really see the need to do so -- people and software notice it,
> people and software extract meaning from it
Some people extract "meaning" from all sorts of things where no meaning
is present (e.g. believing that they see the image of a human face in a
landscape photo on Mars). Just because some people delude themselves
into believing that there is meaning doesn't make it so.