At 8:14 PM -0500 11/30/04, Bruce Lilly wrote:
How many UAs make it possible, let alone easy, for authors to
edit References or In-Reply-To fields?
The only ones I know of where it's possible are ones that have a
"dump the whole message in a buffer" mode.
I question whether this sort of thing could be done in a way that
would make it comprehensible enough for any significant number of
users to bother with.
For that matter, how many permit a user to select multiple
messages to compose a response citing all of the selected
messages (including appropriate setting of In-Reply-To and
References fields)?
Only one that I know of. ;-)
This is probably an area where some advice to UA authors is called for.
But what advice?
IMAP has a number of features that operate on the server's
message store as directed by the client, including searching
capability.
If the exact operation you want to do is built into the IMAP
protocol, and if you happen to be talking to a server that hasn't
taken one of the numerous escape hatches available to IMAP servers,
great. Unfortunately, your chances of implementing anything complex
or unanticipated with help from an IMAP server are small. You would
certainly wind up fetching the message to do Bayesian analysis on it,
for example.
--
Where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket?