From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clerew.man.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Feb 09 2004 - 08:17:10 CST
In <40245B5F.4060304@erols.com> Bruce Lilly <blilly@erols.com> writes:
>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.
>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?
It isn't. The best it can do is to assume (if it needs to do some
comparison with other headers) that the first "Re: " can be ignored. So
maybe it fails to do what the explict poster intended. Tough! Explicit
posters who do stupid things are sufficiently uncommon that we can
tolerate such failures occasionally.
Broken posting agents are also uncommon, but they make up for that by
making the same broken mistake repeatedly, so increasing the number of
failures in otherwise working agents elsewhere. That is why broken posting
agents should be sat upon. One might like to sit upon broken posters too,
but it is harder to write a standard to do that :-( .
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Email: chl@clerew.man.ac.uk Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5