From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.emacs.gnus.general/38435 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Daniel Pittman Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.gnus.general Subject: Re: message-subject-re Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2001 12:31:48 +1000 Organization: Not today, thank you, Mother. Message-ID: <87bskyz4mx.fsf@inanna.rimspace.net> References: <877kvm4e6k.fsf@inanna.rimspace.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: coloc-standby.netfonds.no Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: main.gmane.org 1035174298 22364 80.91.224.250 (21 Oct 2002 04:24:58 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@main.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 04:24:58 +0000 (UTC) Return-Path: Return-Path: Original-Received: (qmail 13493 invoked from network); 30 Aug 2001 02:32:39 -0000 Original-Received: from melancholia.rimspace.net (HELO melancholia.danann.net) (203.36.211.210) by gnus.org with SMTP; 30 Aug 2001 02:32:39 -0000 Original-Received: from localhost (melancholia.rimspace.net [203.36.211.210]) by melancholia.danann.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3AC802A833 for ; Thu, 30 Aug 2001 12:32:22 +1000 (EST) Original-Received: by localhost (Postfix, from userid 1000) id C397482055; Thu, 30 Aug 2001 12:31:48 +1000 (EST) Original-To: ding@gnus.org In-Reply-To: (Michael.Cook@cisco.com's message of "Wed, 29 Aug 2001 21:50:02 -0400") X-Homepage: http://danann.net/ User-Agent: Gnus/5.090004 (Oort Gnus v0.04) XEmacs/21.5 (artichoke) Original-Lines: 68 Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.emacs.gnus.general:38435 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.gnus.general:38435 On Wed, 29 Aug 2001, Michael Cook wrote: > Daniel Pittman writes: > >> ...and it does mean that it's not going to be possible for some email >> clients that use the subject line to sort threads to tell that your >> messages are part of one. > > that's not really possible in general anyhow. mailers and remailers > mangle subject lines in many various ways that make sorting by > subject line challenging at best. Oh, it's possible. It's not /effective/, but it's possible. It's also the only mode of operation for many of the Win32 mailers out there. Oddly, enough, it's the default mode of operation for all the ones that can't get the References header right, generally, which are the *cause* of the inability to thread any other way... *sigh* >> Er, /why/ do you want to do that? > > after seeing one too many subject lines that looked like > > Subject: Re: Fwd: FW: [list-name] RE: Fwd: foo > > it occurred to me that the Re prefix has no real value. that it's > probably just a hold-over from way back before mail readers were > sophisticated enough to use the References and other headers. one > of those things that mailers do because, well, they've just always > done it that way. and for no other reason. this kind of meta-data > doesn't need to be encoded into the subject line. there are other > headers for that. Ah, but it /does/ contain more than just a hold-over value, just like the cited text: it tells me, as a human, what this message is. Specifically, it *does* contain the information that this is a message in reference to another, not an original message itself. It also serves to identify which message it was. Now, Gnus /could/ insert that bit of text itself based on the References header ... but that's not going to work unless the world gets that right. Maybe it's even part of the new SMTP/RFC822 codification RFC documents that went out recently. Let's check, shall we? ...time passes... Ah, here we are. So, they say that the subject field MAY be prefixed with "Re: " when it's a reply. I guess that the authors felt that this was not quite vital to the operation of the mail system, but that it's not a bad idea. So, your "not insert Re" is legal by the new mail format RFC. Cool. I still don't think it's a good idea, but that's because my mailer doesn't do it for me, which it legitimately could. I strongly agree that the various mailing list tags and mangling, etc, reduce the value of the field, though. There should be Gnus functionality to clean those up so that we can see and send well formed messages. Daniel -- Hocine Bibo Aut In Eum Digitos Insero?