to follow up on what Ant Mitchell said:
Subject: Re: Posting from a message
Cc: ehood(_at_)hydra(_dot_)acs(_dot_)uci(_dot_)edu
NB: Earl may prefer questions be asked on the list.
I'm still understanding what is going on, I am a three day veteran now.
From what I understand I intended to use my own cgi because that way
I can use the original message id in the reply, which I assumed was the way
to ensure mhonarc gets its threading right.
Q. If I use the mailto method and the user does not change the subject, then
will mhonarc still get the threading right ?.
If the User's browser implements the Subject parameter on the mailto,
then Mhonarc will thread this reply OK. Browsers that do include
Lynx and Netscape, but not all.
Q. If he changes the subject in the reply (using the mailto) then there
is no way mhonarc can thread against the original. ?
Lynx will not presently map the In-Reply-To parameter into the
outgoing mail, and the threading will fail in this case (with
unmodified MHonArc. I don't know how thorough the Netscape
implementation is. The URLs as I show them will thread the mail
if the browser has fully implemented the Internet Draft. But I
don't know about implementation status outside Lynx which is
negative.
If you are game to hack MHonArc, there is still a way to thread
Mailto: replies based on the *-URL: header in the mail. If this
URL matches your archive, then you can treat the mail as a reply.
But scanning for this information and testing the URLs is a
small matter of MHonArc programming.
My users are not computer literate and will change the subject line and
may still expect threading.
Any users that are computer literate enough to care about threading
will soon learn to change or not change subjects accordingly.
I now plan to use both ways !, a cgi for replying to messages, which
will allow the user to change the subject, and a general mailto link
link of the index pages which is not in reply to any particular
message, but to a particular mail address for each forum ( I need
multiple mail discussion groups ).
Obviously I could use a cgi for both, but using a mailto means I don't have
to do the posting from my server and there is less chance of the user
getting his email address wrong (my users are not computer literate!).
Am I off beam here ?.
Not far, if at all.
You can see if the user is allowing his email to go forward to the
server in HTTP headers. If so, get the CGI to initialize the email
with that.
Ant
Earl mentioned my mailto: example.
You might want to look at
http://www.access.digex.net/%7Easgilman/dev-access/2/headless.rc
etc.
NB: copy to list if you think relevant.
Done.
--
Al Gilman
