RWK%SCRC-YUKON@MIT-MC.ARPA ("Robert W. Kerns") (03/07/84)
I'm tired of this topic. Let's talk about your In-Reply-To: header.
Received: from MIT-MC by SCRC-YUKON with CHAOS; Tue 6-Mar-84 20:53:07-EST
Date: 6 Mar 84 1852 EST
From: Rudy.Nedved@CMU-CS-A
To: Mark Crispin <MRC@SU-SCORE>
Subject: Re: SMTP and authentication
CC: Header-People@MIT-MC
In-Reply-To: "Mark Crispin's message of 6 Mar 84 16:57-EST"
Message-Id: <06Mar84.185221.EN0C@CMU-CS-A>
It's different; something I hadn't seen before. It would have been
useful, except for two things:
1) You use the pretty "Mark Crispin's" personal name instead of
(or without including) the actual mailbox name.
2) You turn what would have been a perfectly nice phrase parsable phrase
into a single word by quoting it.
I just wanted to call your attention to the fact that despite RFC822's
lack of any useful advice on the issue, there ARE those of us out here
with mail-readers capable of making good use of the In-Reply-To field.
Since your mail-sender obviously goes to enough work to generate
everything needed, why not include the mailbox-name with the personal
name?
In my opinion, any In-Reply-To: header which doesn't include Date: and
From: mailbox information, or Message-ID: information, is useless
fluffery, and cannot be relied on to identify any particular message.
This includes constructs like "Your message of", since too often people
add and delete recipients.
Also, in the interest of standardization, and so we don't need to
recognize still another format (although it's not hard), I would
recommend the following format.
In-Reply-To: The message of 6 Mar 84 16:57-EST from Mark Crispin <MRC@SU-SCORE>
This format, or something close, is pretty widly used by those who
generate the In-Reply-To: header at all when there is no message ID, and
our mail-reader is capable of quickly finding the referenced message
from this information.
Indeed, by tracing forward and backward using this information, I
can delete an entire conversation at a single keystroke, which
is what I wanted to do with the topic under discussion.
I hope any future header-RFC writers include some useful information,
and maybe even restrictions, on In-Reply-To next time around. Oh, well.
But since this is a different topic, I have carefully deleted my
In-Reply-To: header: In-reply-to: <06Mar84.185221.EN0C@CMU-CS-A>Rudy.Nedved@CMU-CS-A.ARPA (03/07/84)
My world does not cover "mail compostion" issues and the people that normally work on RdMail either have left or are extremely busy and can not expend the time to get this kinda of thing fixed. I wish I could help but all I influence is delivering the message rain, sleet, power failure, disk crash (well...) and sunny weather (in Pittsburgh??? ha!). -Rudy