From: Usenet News Support (support@deathstar.prodigy.com)
Date: Fri Jun 11 2004 - 09:56:38 CDT
On Fri, 4 Jun 2004, Charles Lindsey wrote:
> [Bill]:
> >I offer again the suggestion that a back reference (or potential BR) be
> >defined as "any sequence of non-blank characters ending in a colon and
> >followed by a blank." That would give some false positives, they clearly
> >don't hurt if Re: is not added as long as the References header is
> >present, and will detect all examples I've seen in this list so far.
>
> I think the problem of false positives would be too severe. But there is
> nothing to stop some reading agent implementor trying it if he wants to.
> Just that we don't want to place him in the position where he thinks he is
> "expected" to do more than "Re: ".
>
> >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?
They didn't match any previous header and for the most part topic. I
would say few, people just seem to start with "Re:" every once in a
while, or "RE:" or "re:" which I also saw.
I haven't seen a post with "Re:" and a subject match not be a folloup
except when the subject was "test" of course. I know it happens, I just
haven't seen it in any group I actually read.
-- bill davidsen SBC/Prodigy Yorktown Heights NY data center Project Leader, USENET news http://newsgroups.news.prodigy.com