ietf-822
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Re: I-D Recommendations for Automatic Responses to Electronic Mail

2002-06-06 13:16:01

Keith Moore <moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu> writes:

Also, the SHOULD use "in-reply-to" and MAY use "References" is silly.
In-Reply-To fields are enormously varied and hard to parse;
"References" fields are much better.  We should definitely encourage
people to support References over In-Reply-To.

Seems like in-reply-to is more widely supported, though.  I'm curious to
hear what other people think about this.  It wouldn't bother me too much
to make both of them SHOULD.

References is definitely more widely supported than In-Reply-To for actual
practical purposes.  Many, if not most, In-Reply-To headers contain so
much unstructured, extraneous information that they're essentially only
informational to humans and cannot be effectively used by software.
References has never had this problem, and is therefore clearly superior
technically.

I wholeheartedly agree that we should be recommending References over
In-Reply-To at every opportunity.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra(_at_)stanford(_dot_)edu)             
<http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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