From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clerew.man.ac.uk)
Date: Sat Jun 05 2004 - 14:50:21 CDT
In <200406041816.i54IGRP22709@panix5.panix.com> Seth Breidbart <sethb@panix.com> writes:
>"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. ...
>There are also people using a broken followup agent that copies the
>References header (without appending the Message-ID)....
>In both of those cases, the "Re: " isn't manually inserted, and the
>article isn't (according so some definitions) a followup.
Though it is so according to the definition in our draft.
>> 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).
OK, I have made it "such an initial "Re: ".
Time to show you the full text as it currently stands, after various
recent tweaks:
2. The Subject-header SHOULD by default be taken from that of the
precursor's Subject-header. The case sensitive string "Re: "
(known as a "back reference") MAY be prepended to its Subject-
Content unless it already begins with that string.
NOTE: The practice of prepending such a "Re: " (an abbreviation,
commonly used in English and some other languages, for the Latin
"In re", meaning "in the matter of") is widespread, but also not
without its difficulties (described in detail in [USEAGE]). 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 an
initial "Re: " when comparing subjects. For this reason, no other
form of back-reference (such as a translation of "Re: " into
another language) is permitted, although reading and followup
agents MAY choose to recognize case insensitive forms such as
"RE: ".
Observe that there is no compulsion to use back-references.
Implementors of followup agents are free to prepend them or not as
they see fit.
-- 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