From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clerew.man.ac.uk)
Date: Thu Mar 04 2004 - 10:25:39 CST
In <873c8pxv1f.fsf@windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:
>It is a compliant article. It *has* to be a compliant article because
>there is no way to distinguish it *at a protocol level* from an article
>where a user entered the same text into the Subject header themselves.
A followup that fails to contain a References header is also a "compliant
article". However, in neither case was the article created by "compliant"
means.
>Software which inserts such a string is poorly considered. I have no
>problems with putting language into the standard which makes this clear
>and specifies what the best course of action for an implementor is.
>E-mail already has language that does this, and I think we should adopt
>it.
Part of the problem with the RFC 2822 language is that it does not make it
clear whether it is speaking of a reply-Subject created automatically by a
reply-agent, or a reply generated entirely manually by a user, or both.
Whereas it _does_ make that distinction when discussing the From and
Reply-To headers. This enables Bruce to claim it means one thing and
others to claim it means another which is, I think, evidence that the
wording needs tightening up. Note that this is orthogonal to whether the
wording used is "SHOULD" or "ought".
>People intentionally start new threads while quoting existing messages all
>the time.
People also continue existing threads by creating a new article with
"Subject: Re: the old subject". RFC 1036 actually suggests that they should
manually insert a References header in that case, though I doubt it is
often done.
Anyway, a thought that now occurs to me is that followup agents should
observe a change of header by the user and ask "Do you intend to start a
new thread" and, if the user said "yes", they would omit the References
header (note that there could be valid circumstances for both answers, so
2nd guessing would not be a good idea). We might even promote that
suggestion in USEAGE.
If widely adopted, this would reduce the case for detection of subject
changes by reading agents (though that would likely continue for a long
time).
>If you're [John Moreno] honestly confused about my position, I would like
>to clarify it until you understand it.
And Vice Versa? :-(
-- 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