Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!bionet!ames!uhccux!munnari.oz.au!mimir!hugin!augean!sirius!hacker!jeremy
From: jeremy@misadel.oz (Jeremy Begg)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: Proliferation of "Re^n:" in subject lines
Message-ID: <5696@misadel.oz>
Date: 18 Jul 89 12:14:12 GMT
References: <532.24B7A45F@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us>
Organization: Management Information Systems, Adelaide, South Australia
Lines: 39

In article <532.24B7A45F@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us>, mju@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us (Marc Unangst) writes:
> The "Re^n:" business is a direct violation of RFC-1036:
> 2.1.4.  Subject
>      ... If the message is submitted in
> |   response to another message (e.g., is a follow-up) the default
> |   subject should begin with the four characters "Re:", and the
>     "References" line is required.
> ...
> 2.2.5.  References
>
>     This field lists the Message-ID's of any messages prompting the
>     submission of this message.  It is required for all follow-up
>     messages, and forbidden when a new subject is raised.
> ...

      If the 'posting' part of all newsreaders everywhere did as they were
meant to, it would be possible to construct a newsreader which performed an
intelligent sort of the news items, before they were displayed, based on
the Subject: and References: headers, and the date the item was _sent_.  It
would then be a simple matter for the user to see all the followups to all
the items and select those discussions which were of interest, instead of
wading through a tangled mess of originals and followups.

        At the moment, I find that in some newsgroups, the followups are
received _before_ the original items -- a bit of a pain if there were 50 or
more postings received that day!  I suspect this is happening when a news
batch is prepared from separate posting files, each of the same name but
increasing in version number (yes, I use VMS), so that the highest version
(ie most recently created) is processed first when the postings are
conglomerated into a singe NEWS.BATCH file.  But that is a separate
problem, one that ought to be fixed at the time news batch is forwarded.

        Jeremy Begg

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