From: Seth Breidbart (sethb@panix.com)
Date: Fri Jun 04 2004 - 13:16:27 CDT
"Charles Lindsey" <chl@clerew.man.ac.uk> wrote, and quoted
> Usenet News Support <support@deathstar.prodigy.com> writes:
>>Wrong. My spam filter flags "Re:" without a References header as a one
>>point item, and I see it in logs regularly, perhaps 4-5 times a week. It's
>>not unheard of, just uncommon.
>
> But how many of those were people doing "manual followups", i.e. joining
> an existing thread with a manually inserted "Re: ", but not using a
> followup agent and not responding to a particular precursor?
In a (robo-)moderated newsgroup (e.g. soc.singles.moderated) there are
several users who post by emailing the moderator, lacking References
headers entirely. Their articles are often "followups" according to a
human definition: attribution lines, quoted text being responded to,
etc.
There are also people using a broken followup agent that copies the
References header (without appending the Message-ID). Their articles
appear at the wrong point in the tree (again, based on body evidence
about where they belong); if they follow up to an initial article,
their articles lack a References header.
In both of those cases, the "Re: " isn't manually inserted, and the
article isn't (according so some definitions) a followup.
> Some reading agents take note of the Subject-header (as well as
> other headers) when presenting articles for display (again, see
> [USEAGE]) and such agents find it desirable to ignore such a
> "Re: " when comparing subjects.
That's fine, though
s/such a "Re: "/"an initial "Re: "/
would (I think) make it better (less potentially ambiguous, and we've
seen people misconstrue references to the same paragraph before).
Seth