From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Wed Mar 03 2004 - 22:16:05 CST
Bruce Lilly <blilly@erols.com> writes:
> J.B.Moreno wrote:
>> This is bogus on three grounds -- one, I can put anything I like into
>> any header that I like without even resorting to telnet where
>> everything that goes out is what I typed in, which means that all
>> followup requirements are out the window (including References) if the
>> user's ability to override is to be considered relevant.
> You are wrong; users are not permitted to override References.
I have to disagree here; people do so routinely. Sometimes they use
extended workarounds to do so (start a reply, copy the quoted text into a
scratch buffer, abort the reply, start a new message, enter the Subject,
paste the quoted text into the buffer, start composing the message), but
users do often post replies that are not followups and do not have
References.
This is done intentionally, to pull some specific point that may be
unrelated to another thread out of that thread and into its own separate
discussion.
In my news reader, the way I have it configured, this is fairly simple. I
start a reply, and then go into the headers and delete References and
In-Reply-To and generally change the Subject.
There's nothing about this action that, to my mind, violates any protocol.
A followup is defined by the existence of the References header; there's
nothing wrong with composing a brand new message that is not a followup
but happens to cite other messages.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>