From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Mon Jun 28 2004 - 17:37:32 CDT
Frank Ellermann <nobody@xyzzy.claranet.de> writes:
> Quite possible, but just to be sure: Sometimes subjects can
> have a structure, e.g. cmsg, or a conventional meaning like
> subjects for FAQs. Some servers / gateways / clients can do
> "something" with this structure or conventional meaning.
Yup. (Multipart binaries are a better example than FAQs.)
> There's never a technical problem with followups if they start
> with "Re: ", because Re: cmsg is no cmsg, and Re: FAQ should
> not trigger filters for Subject: FAQ.
This part I just don't consider very important when discussing Re:. Yes,
using Re: happens to have the nice side effect of indicating that a
message's subject probably shouldn't be interpreted in various other ways,
but that's just a small aspect of the more general issue, which is that
some subjects are interpreted in other ways. The answer for gateways in
dealing with Subject: cmsg isn't "use Re:", it's "escape cmsg in some
fashion if it's not supposed to be a control message." That's the more
fully correct solution, and once you have that, Re: is unimportant for
that particular problem.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>