Errors-to: owner-drums@CS.UTK.EDU
Date: Fri, 28 Jul 1995 10:39:07 +0200 (MET DST)
From: Jacob Palme <jpalme@dsv.su.se>
To: ietf-drums <drums@CS.UTK.EDU>
Subject: Re: Format of In-Reply-To and References
Message-Id: <Pine.SUN.3.91.950728103035.16745B-100000@ester>
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John Gardiner Myers <jgm+@cmu.edu> writes:

> The way I would word it in the new specification would be to deprecate
> any use of References: that does not match <insert RFC 1036 wording,
> minus the trimming requirement>.

Not *exactly* the RFC 1036 wording.

"newsgroup" should be changed to "newsgroup or distribution list".

It might also be natural to use "References" for discussion items
within a group of recipients for a set of multi-recipient messages,
even if there is neither a newsgroup or a distribution list involved.

In this way, "References" could mean a reply in any kind of group
discussion, while "In-Reply-To" would be used for replies only
sent to the author(s) and no one else.

As much as possible, if a header field is used in both e-mail
and in Usenet News, its meaning in e-mail should be either the
same as in Usenet News, or extended in natural ways from netnews
to e-mail, such as extending "newsgroup" to "newsgroup or
distribution list".

That is the same kind of extension I suggest for "Followup-To",
extend it from referring to only a newsgroup, to allow also the
name of a mailing list if that is where further discussion is
to be held. There is no problem with distinguishing between
newsgroups and mailing lists, since there is no "@" in a newsgroup
name, but always a "@" in a mailing list name.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jacob Palme <jpalme@dsv.su.se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/~jpalme