From: Usenet News Support (support@deathstar.prodigy.com)
Date: Mon Mar 15 2004 - 13:18:10 CST
On Thu, 4 Mar 2004, Charles Lindsey wrote:
> 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.
More frequently I would expect people to ask for a followup and change the
subject, with or without "was" usage. The existance of both references
and subject for information allows (not mandates, John) allows a UA to
take special action to make this clear to the user. And this is current
practice in some UAs.
> 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.
I don't oppose that, but I think it's a waste of time in practical terms.
-- bill davidsen SBC/Prodigy Yorktown Heights NY data center Project Leader, USENET news http://newsgroups.news.prodigy.com Please send usenet-related mail to news-support@prodigy.net