Keith Moore wrote:
IMO, Subject should be unstructured, period. Unfortunately, RFC 1036
introduced two
hacks:
Usenet is not email, and email should not be expected to inherit every
feature (or mistake) of Usenet.
Transfer details are irrelevant to the message format. The format is
essentially the same, and
in many contexts (e.g. via IMAP) a message is just a message -- there is
no way to differentiate
"Usenet" and "email". "Re: " is a mistake of Usenet that RFC 2822 has
picked up and run with.
("cmsg" can for the moment be ignored here, since it is only significant
for Usenet transport
software) From the point of view of library code handling the message
format, the fact that
1036 requires "Re: " (and cmsg) to be recognized effectively makes that
part of the syntax;
library code has no way of knowing whether the calling application is
Usenet-specific software,
an MTA, an email-only MUA, a combined email/news UA, or an IMAP client
(for which there
is no Usenet/email distinction).
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