Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!decwrl!shelby!rutgers!cmcl2!phri!marob!cowan
From: cowan@marob.MASA.COM (John Cowan)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: List of sites with broken Followup (No References) Software
Message-ID: <649@marob.MASA.COM>
Date: 10 May 89 20:15:11 GMT
References: <3222@looking.UUCP>
Reply-To: cowan@marob.masa.com (John Cowan)
Organization: ESCC  New York City
Lines: 20

In article <3222@looking.UUCP> brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) writes:
>I have the full details on sender/from pairs for these bad articles.  That's
>too much to post, so I will just list the offending Sender: and From: line
>sites below, with the counts of bad articles.   One clear problem is
>messages from Fidonet and some BITNET relays.   For Unix sites, working
>postnews software is available now, for free.

I am currently lobbying the Fidonet Technical Standards Association and the
author of the Fidonet<->Usenet/uucp gateway to handle Message-Id: and
In-Reply-To:/References: lines "correctly" by maintaining this information
internally to Fidonet messages.  Don't expect too much too soon, though;
still, at least there should soon at least >exist< a way of handling this
problem within Fidonet, even if it will be a long time before Fidonet
message-generators actually generate correct information.

A probable workaround is to strip "Re:" from subject lines, and not to
believe that an article is a followup unless a "References:" line exists.
Otherwise, use some kind of default followup algorithm (the one I use says
"This message is a followup to the last non-locally-written message with
the same subject" -- not perfect, but workable).