In <20030402200336(_dot_)A8484(_at_)zardoc(_dot_)esmtp(_dot_)org> Claus Assmann
<ca+asrg(_at_)esmtp(_dot_)org> writes:
Maybe I should make it more clear: you send a question to sendmail.org,
you can get an answer from esmtp.org, some university, some Unix
vendor, some other domain...
Hence your original mail must already include a "token" which allows
the reply to go through without depending on the sender address
(domain).
Hey, I have an idea!
You want to identify the message, so this "token" should be placed in
a header called, uh, how about "Message-ID:". In order to make this
message-id work, you would want to make sure that it is unique to
every message that you send.
Then, when someone replies to this message the MUA could create a new
header, uh, let's call it "In-Reply-To:" that contains this
message-id. That way we know that the reply was related to a message
that we sent. Since the message-id is unique, it will be hard for a
spammer to guess and you could decide how long keep track of
message-ids so even if a spammer got ahold of one, it couldn't be used
for long.
The big plus of having things like a "message-id" and "in-reply-to"
headers would be for mailing lists like this. A mail reader could tie
all the messages together into threads making it much easier to follow
the discussions. To help with making the threading of messages more
robust, you could add a header that lists all the message-ids of all
messages involved in this set of branches of a thread. Maybe we could
call this header something like "References:".
Wouldn't it be great if something like this had been created become
standard decades ago, so that even MicroSoft and Window mail systems
would follow such a standard? (Hint to Phillip Hallam-Baker, Eric
D. Williams, etc.) Or, at least didn't create damaged In-Reply-To
headers by breaking the message-id into two parts. (Hint to Art
Pollard)
-wayne
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