From: Bruce Lilly (blilly@erols.com)
Date: Tue Jun 22 2004 - 22:13:10 CDT
Frank Ellermann wrote:
> So far all attempts to ignore the existing simple structure
> of Subject: headers in news [...]
Sorry, there is no structure. That ship sailed more than twenty
years ago when RFC 850 adopted RFC 822 Internet Text Message format
and its Subject field (in preference to "Title" which had earlier
been used in news) -- Subject had already been in use for a decade
at that time, and was clearly defined as unstructured.
> A "Subject: Re: text" or a "Subject: cmsg text" is not the
> same as a "Subject: text"
"Subject: foo" isn't the same as "Subject: bar" -- what's your point?
> After months of debate it should be obvious that no solution
> trying to decree a 1:1 correspondence with e-mail subjects
> works for news.
The Subject field has no significance in email (RFC 2821 and extensions).
In the Internet Message format (RFC 2822) which is a common message
format used by email, news, fax, VPIM, EDI, etc., Subject is defined
as an unstructured field containing only human-readable content describing
the topic of the message. 2822 updates RFC 822, which has been the basis
of the news article format for two decades, and 2822 is the basis used
by USEFOR.