From: Henry Spencer (henry@spsystems.net)
Date: Sat Jul 03 2004 - 20:37:29 CDT
On Sat, 3 Jul 2004, Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz wrote:
> >We want compatibility with RfC 2822.
>
> RFC 2822 doesn't treat "cmsg" as special. If you want compatibility
> with RFC 2822, then the proper text is a statement that Subject has
> the syntax and semantics defined in RFC 2822, with nothing added...
Remember, the reason we say "compatible" rather than "identical" is that
there *is* something different about it. Beyond that, it's not really
very meaningful to just say "compatible", because the correct response to
that is "compatible *how*?".
In general, the way news has been compatible with mail is that any news
article is also a valid mail message, but not vice-versa. This form of
compatibility doesn't preclude additional restrictions and attaching
special meaning to constructs that don't have any in mail, and news does
both of those things (e.g., our additional headers are valid mail headers,
but mail software treats them as unstructured blobs because it has no idea
what they mean).
> The
> "Re: " argument is about adding text that is *not* compatible with RFC
> 2822.
"Not compatible" *how*? It doesn't make news articles invalid as mail
messages, which is the main form of compatibility news historically has
with mail.
Henry Spencer
henry@spsystems.net