From: "David A. Black" <dblack@...>
Date: 2004-06-04T03:17:42+09:00
Subject: Re: Reply wasn't posted; will test new post

Hi --

On Thu, 3 Jun 2004, Dennis Oelkers wrote:

> Hello David, ruby-talk, c.l.r.,
> 
> David A. Black wrote:
> > The remaining problem seems to be subject lines with "Re:" in them,
> > when there are no In-Reply-To and References: headers.  This
> > apparently makes the NNTP server flag the message as a followup and
> > then be unhappy because there's no reference.  
> 
> My further investigations proved that this is really the problem. The
> symptoms are the same as with the first problem (I get a 441 - "Followup
> without a reference" - when posting the mail to the newsgroup), but this
> time the solution is non-trivial. The first case ("In-Reply-To" flag in
> header but not "References" flag) was solved by adding the missing flag
> by duplicating the message-id of the "In-Reply-To" flag. In this case
> both flags are missing. The MUA which was used by Austin Ziegler adds
> "Thread-Topic" / "Thread-Index" flags to the header which are supposed
> to solve the threading, but this is not applicable to Usenet.
> 
> This leads to the conclusion that we have three possible solutions:
> - Add an "In-Reply-To"/"References" flag to the header by using the
>    message-id of THAT mail => the message would appear on c.l.r., but
>    threading would be broken
> - drop the message on the floor at the gateway => ruby-talk / c.l.r.
>    are inconsistent
> - my solution: as mua's are more or less allowed to do whatever they
>    want my fear is that we get more and more of such borderline cases
>    so the only solution is that we establish identical posting policies
>    on both the mailing-list host and the gateway/nntp host we're posting
>    too. (ML-Maintainers? Any Comments on this one?)

I (reluctantly) would opt for the first one, if it's the likeliest way
to get all messages through.  Maybe for messages with "Re:" but no
References: you could add X-Missing-Reference header or
something... so that some day if someone figures out a way to fix it
we can easily find them :-)


David

-- 
David A. Black
dblack@wobblini.net