List etiquette

[Ian Zimmerman]

Paul> If I am one of the guilty ones, I wouldn't know how my mailer does
Paul> it anyway.  And, showing my ignorance for all to see, I thought
Paul> threading was only something newsgroups did (many of them have an
Paul> xref line in the header, where mail has no such cross-refs). It
Paul> would appear to me that MUAs artificially induce threading.  And
Paul> when the mailer sees a reply done a little differently, it breaks
Paul> that thread.

Xref has nothing (well, little) to do with threading.  It is used to
suppress articles that are posted to multiple groups or immediately
mark them as read, so you don't have to read them twice.  You confuse
this with References, see below.

William> Close.  The header most often referenced is In-Reply-To, as
William> referenced by RFC 822. 

Close :-)

822 has long been superceded by 2822, which specifies in much more detail
the newer References header (which collects _all_ Message-Ids from the
preceding thread, not just the last one).

Mailers that conform to 822 but not 2822 (and unfortunately some are
still extant, such as Eudora 5.x) are part of the problem, because some
_readers_ will look at References first, and if References is botched
they get confused even if In-Reply-To is correct.

-- 
A true pessimist won't be discouraged by a little success.
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml