Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: "reply all" etiquette: reply-all vs. reply'ing to list

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Miles" == Miles Bader <address@hidden> writes:

    Miles> Nikolai Weibull <address@hidden> writes:

    >> I thought that Mail-Followup-To wasn't part of any "standard"
    >> yet

    Miles> It's not as far as I know, but it's widely implemented, so
    Miles> it's pretty much a de-facto standard these days, especially
    Miles> among the more clueful MUAs out there like Gnus and Mutt
    Miles> (which I'm sure we all use :-).

MFT is not an Internet standard.  The working group deadlocked over
whether mailing lists should be considered "authors" for the purpose
of munging MFT in posts they remail, and if so, what were appropriate
behaviors for mailing lists.

However, the semantics for the receiving MUA are unambiguous and (as
long as mailing lists don't munge it) unambiguously useful, and nobody
has argued with them.  So only curmudgeons like Kyle Jones refuse to
implement it.  "De-facto standard" captures it nicely.

    Miles> I'm sure if there were an adequate "official" replacement,
    Miles> that would be happily supported too, but there's not.

    >> and was frowned upon by many.

    Miles> I think this is not true.  It's no doubt frowned upon by
    Miles> _some_, but largely it seems to be well-liked by the
    Miles> clueful.

MFT, as proposed by Bernstein (maybe that requires an extension to
mail; ISTR Bernstein's proposal was for use in news only), is
considered a good idea by everybody I know, including Kyle.  Kyle's
point is simply that it doesn't have an "X-" prefix, and therefore
trespasses on a reserved namespace.  It's very hard to like something
that does that, when it's so unnecessary.

    >> Why does this list seem to add tabs in the subject line?  I'm
    >> guessing this is due to some kind of mailing list header
    >> munging for wrapping long header lines gone bad?

IIRC, RFC 2822 semantics for wrapped headers specify removal of the
CRLF, and that's it.  All of the leading whitespace is preserved.  I
think that MUAs SHOULD also compress the whitespace if they rewrap the
header, but it's arguable.


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