From: Bruce Lilly (blilly@erols.com)
Date: Fri Feb 06 2004 - 21:28:31 CST
Charles Lindsey wrote:
> On the contrary. It singles out "Re: " for special attention, and thereby
> establishes that followup agents which insert "cmsg", "FW", "Fwd", "Auto",
> etc (and more importantly "Re: Re: " and "Re^2: "), except under the
> explicit direction of the poster, are non-compliant. It means that "Re: "
> is the ONLY thing that can be inserted automatically.
Syntax has nothing to do with "attention", "followup agents", "poster",
or "automatically".
If "explicit direction of the poster" is given to begin a Subject with
"Re: Re: ", how is a reading agent supposed to know that "explicit
direction" was given? Which software is going to detect that the
rule was broken? Which software is going to enforce the prohibition?
This is getting silly. Subject is unstructured; it can begin with "foo",
with "Re: ", with "Re: Re: ", or with "Heil Blair, Sieg Heil!". Attempts
to forbid any such content are doomed to failure. Likewise, attempts to
require Subject to begin (for some unspecified meaning of "begin") with
"Re: " or "Simple George says" are doomed to failure. And requiring or
forbidding some behavior based on any such content is also pointless.
If some software author wishes to ignore "Re: " for the purpose of
determining what the subject "is" for display, that is not a protocol
issue, and we have no business commenting on it. Likewise if he wishes
to ignore any or all of the "Re: "-spawned cruft (FW:, Fwd:, Auto:, etc.).
And if some software author decides to automatically insert "This text
was inserted by the Foo Baz News UA" at the start of the Subject field of
the 23rd article posted on the 3rd Wednesday of every month whose English
name contains the letter 'r', that's none of our business. And the same
applies to "Re: " and follow-ups.