Hey Guys --

That's one of the reasons that math uses universally agreed on 
symbols instead of words.

Cheers,

Alan

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At 6:43 AM -0500 2/2/02, Scott A Crosby wrote:
>On 2 Feb 2002, Cees de Groot wrote:
>
>>  (did that sound sarcastic? Well, it was meant to. Go to large parts of the
>>  worlds, and people will *not* understand English and - justifiably - have no
>
>Who said anything about English. its from 'in re', which is Latin!
>
>Blame latin speakers, not english speakers.
>   http://www.faqs.org/usefor/1997/Jul/0134.html
>
>So, find the nearest latin speaker and bitch them out, not me.
>
>
>>  sympathy at all with such views. I fail to see why Germans should generally
>
>Because when all clients start adding random prefixes...... Two more
>round-trips with this email and the subject will be cut off on the right
>side of the window.
>
>Adding random prefixes make the subject header useless to for humans --
>hard to parse and read. And computers -- it will break naieve clients who
>do cheap threading by sorting on subject&date (after canonicalizing by
>removing any 're:' prefix.) This works pretty well, and there are a lot of
>naive clients... Is Celeste one of them?
>
>>  use something they don't understand when they send mails just in case that
>>  someone somewhere in the USofA is inconvenienced because his mailreader
>>  doesn't follow in-reply-to when threading.... Really, everyone in Germany
>
>Not robust. With a sampling of the messages on the list, barely half have
>any In-Reply-To or References header. Those that do only mostly have one
>such email, the one they're replying to. Thus, for each missing
>(lost/deleted) message in some archive, the parentage tree will gain at
>least one partitian per missing email. By partitian, I mean there's no way
>to calculate that two threads which are siblings actually are siblings.
>
>And, a fallback of 'sort on subject' will be thwarted by the randomly
>added prefixes on the subject lines.
>
>>  understands 'Antwort'. If there's one thing to complain about, it 
>>is that the
>>  related RFC's are lacking here which apparently necessitates the Re/AW/...
>>  thingies in Subject: lines).
>
>Any sophisticated client that uses References/In-Reply-To can't deal with
>missing data. Adding random prefixes makes the backup naive approaches
>they use fail. (Try this out experimentally with your mail spool)
>
>Eventually all clients will thread by references, and will be required to
>preserve the entire reference chain to the first email. [*] This'll
>probably take 5-10 years to go through all the clients everywhere.
>
>But, in the mean time, each language's client will be clobbering the
>subject line with random prefixes, and making the 'Subject' of email
>useless and unreadible. Then, the RFC's will notice this stupidity and
>standardize on a new 'Human-Subject' header that is guarenteed to never be
>altered by machine..
>
>And the total gain of this, over a sort-by-subject-and-date is... what?
>
>Well, I would appreciate a good threading mail reader.
>
>But, I'd not want the pain, broken clients, and hard to follow/read email
>for the next decade, because some people dislike the latin 're:' prefix
>for replies?
>
>Scott
>
>[*] There are interesting edge-cases in the reconstruction algorithm,
>especially when the data you feed it is mutually inconsistent. A malicious
>person forging these References lines could certainly produce some
>fun. :)


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