From: Bruce Lilly (blilly@erols.com)
Date: Thu Mar 04 2004 - 19:22:17 CST
Charles Lindsey wrote:
> In <4046A2EC.4030401@erols.com> Bruce Lilly <blilly@erols.com> writes:
>>In this particular case, there is no syntax issue, and no protocol
>>issue (because Subject field content is exclusively for human
>>consumption).
>
>
> And that is where you are entirely wrong.
No, RFC 2822 is quite clear on that matter:
"subject = "Subject:" unstructured CRLF
comments = "Comments:" unstructured CRLF
keywords = "Keywords:" phrase *("," phrase) CRLF
These three fields are intended to have only human-readable content
with information about the message.
"
Had you been paying attention, you would have seen that in this
very mailing list yesterday.
> Subject-content is regularly
> inspected by non-humans for various purposes, most of which turn out to
> give some perceivable benefit to the users. That current practice is going
> to continue whether we like it or not
Any non-human attempting to interpret the Subject field body
content is going beyond the semantic intent of that field.
Results may be unpredictable. Tough luck for the agent's
authors and its victim^H^H^H^H^H^Husers if they don't like it
> It IS a protocol issue.
Nope. "only human-readable content" is quite clear.
> if
> you suddenly change it, then things that are currenly working quite
> happily are going to stop working.
Exactly what which is "currently working quite happily", and has
any protocol effect (i.e. affecting filing, propagation, relaying,
expiration, loop detection/avoidance and the like) suddenly
"stop[s] working" if "Antwort: " appears at the start of the Subject
field of a followup? Why should the German-speaking poster who
put it there, writing in German in a newsgroup hierarchy where
German is the preferred language give a rat's ass about what
*you* _think_ stops working? If there is some original (i.e. not
a followup) article with
Subject: foo
which is then followed up twice, with the only difference between
the two followups being the message-ids and the Subject fields,
which are:
Subject: foo
and
Subject: Re: foo
what happens differently to those two followups w.r.t. filing,
propagation, relaying, expiration, loop detection/avoidance and
the like?