From: Thomas Fini Hansen <beast@...>
Date: 2004-06-04T05:35:24+09:00
Subject: Re: Reply wasn't posted; will test new post

On Fri, Jun 04, 2004 at 05:01:37AM +0900, Sean O'Dell wrote:
> On Thursday 03 June 2004 07:18, Dennis Oelkers wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Is it possible to mirror the References header item as another header item, 
> and when References is missing and there is a "Re:" in the subject, 
> re-construct it from the other header item?  It could be Outlook is 
> deliberately stripping off References and In-Reply-To, but won't strip off 
> another custom header, such as "X-Gateway-References".

When a MUA is replying, it doesn't take the original mail and strip
out stuff, it constructs a new mail.

It is possible to use unique sender addresses from the mailing list,
and then use a DB to look up what message a mail was reply to, and add
the right headers, but it's rather a lot of work for one bad MUA.

*thinks a bit*

Actually, a general solution might prove popular, it's not like
ruby-talk is the only place that has the thread fallout problem.

As a side note, and I'm baseing this on a very small sample, I think
Thunderbird drops the In-Reply-To and References headers if you delete
all quoted material. My theory is that it does that to combat the
people-that-just-replies-to-an-old-thread-to-start-a-new-one-problem,
which is just about as irritating.

I haven't confirmed this though, so if anyone has more data...

-- 
Thomas
beast@system-tnt.dk