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Re: References, In-Reply-To, and Resent-Message-ID: responses and message fragmentation/reassembly

2004-09-06 19:47:00

At 11.21 -0700 04-09-06, Russ Allbery wrote:
Bruce Lilly <blilly(_at_)erols(_dot_)com> writes:

I further believe that in the case of a response to a message containing
at least one Resent-Message-ID field, the msg-id placed in the response
In-Reply-To and/or References fields should be that of the most recent
Resent-Message-ID rather than that in the Message-ID field (if present)
or any other Resent-Message-ID field which might be present.

I don't believe those semantics would be nearly as useful as following the
standard References semantics.  Consider the case where someone resends a
mailing list message to someone who didn't receive the original, and the
recipient then responds to the message, cc'ing the mailing list.  If the
References header is constructed in the traditional fashion, the reply of
the person to whom the message was resent will thread correctly for all of
the readers of the mailing list.  If the References header is constructed
from the Resent-Message-ID field, it will not.

A related case is if a message with Message-ID A is included as
a body-part in a new message B, and resent in that fashion.
Since References and In-Reply-To naturally use the Message-ID
of the enclosing message, there will be no link to the original
Message-ID, and recipients of it will not be able to threrad
if they only have the original message.

Would not a good solution to both this, and the Resent-Message-ID
case, be to include both Message-IDs in References, but only
the most recent in In-Reply-To.

If you resend a message as a body part with an added comment,
this is rather similar to writing a reply to that message,
and in the case of a reply, both are included in References.
-- 
Jacob Palme <jpalme(_at_)dsv(_dot_)su(_dot_)se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/jpalme/