Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!shelby!agate!ucbvax!EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU!gildea
From: gildea@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU (Stephen Gildea)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.mh
Subject: Re: replcomps (mh-format)
Message-ID: <9102272117.AA01190@excalibur.lcs.mit.edu>
Date: 27 Feb 91 21:17:19 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: MIT X Consortium
Lines: 28

Here is the In-reply-to code from my replcomps:

%<{date}In-reply-to: Message from %(mbox{from})@%(host{from}) of \
%<(nodate{date})%{date}%|%(mday{date}) %(month{date}) %02(putnumf(year{date})) \
%(hour{date}):%02(putnumf(min{date})):%02(putnumf(sec{date})) %(tzone{date})%>\n%>

It produces headers formatted something like this:

In-Reply-To: Message from gildea@expo.lcs.mit.edu of 1 Feb 91 9:51:23 EST

I think the apostrophe in "name's message" is hard to get right all
the time (you risk it looking ugly), hence I say "message from x" instead.

I use the mailbox instead of the real name of the sender to make
conversation tracking more robust.  It also means I don't have to use
quotation marks around the (multi-word) name to make the line easy to
parse.

And I specially format the date to also increase machine parsability:
the default format has a comma in it, which might separate different
replied-to message specifications.  If you don't care about the date
so much, the above code would only be half as long.

Why does MH by default use the somewhat worthless "Your message" format?
When the conversation is on a list, I want to know: *whose* message?

 < Stephen
   MIT X Consortium