From: Bruce Lilly (blilly@erols.com)
Date: Tue Feb 03 2004 - 21:07:10 CST
Charles Lindsey wrote:
> 3. A broken followup agent creates a "Re: Re: " or "Re^2: " situation. In
> this case, unpleasant things DO happen. Subsequent agents may show this
> article separately from others in the same thread. Or they may purport to
> detect a change of subject where none was intended.
Those are display issues.
> So it IS a protocol issue
No, display issues are distinct from protocol issues. Whether or not a
Subject field begins with "Re:" has no effect on whether an article is
injected or relayed, which newsgroups or distributions it is associated
with, whether or not it can be replied to or followed up on (or to which
groups a follow-up is posted), etc.
> BTW, people have been saying that threading by references is THE proper
> way to go about it, and that threading by Subject is old-fashioned.
There is no such thing as "threading by Subject". One can collate by
subject (colloquially "sorting" by subject), but that is quite different
from threading. I believe it was John who gave an example of N articles
with "Subject: help" and M articles with "Subject: Re: help"; collating
by subject does not necessarily group related articles, whereas threading
by references does.
>>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.
>
>
> This particular issue is currently discussed in USEAGE. Maybe that bit
> should be moved to Usefor.
There should be a statement to the effect that any agent that generates
or modifies any part of an article, or allows a user to do so, is
responsible for ensuring the the result is compliant with the relevant
standards. Since dicking with^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmodifying the
Subject appears to be rather common and rather commonly done poorly, it
probably warrants special mention.