From: Usenet News Support (support@deathstar.prodigy.com)
Date: Thu Feb 05 2004 - 16:04:51 CST
On Wed, 4 Feb 2004, John Stanley wrote:
>
> Seth Breidbart (sethb@panix.com):
> > So the ones I'm familiar with assume that it's back-reference,
>
> So they don't have to assume a thing, they look at the References header
> and know that the article is not only a followup, but to what other
> article it is a followup. No guessing involved. And no, we aren't talking
> about trying to fix broken messages by guessing at what they meant --
> that's lunacy. They are broken. They aren't articles. We are talking about
> people who think guessing about things in properly formed articles is a
> reasonable thing to do. That, too, is lunacy, which is easily avoided
> by an existing mandatory header containing explicit information that
> requires no guessing at all.
Unfortunately users don't live in such a perfect world. And mail systems
used for moderated groups will mangle headers, particularly in turning
"References" to "In-Reply-To" or removing it, or simply adding i-r-t
instead of refs. In the real world the Re: is useful, you have made your
point that you don't like it, let's move on.
-- bill davidsen SBC/Prodigy Yorktown Heights NY data center Project Leader, USENET news http://newsgroups.news.prodigy.com Please send usenet-related mail to news-support@prodigy.net