Dave Craven wrote:
The descriptions of the "In-Reply-To" and "References" email
headers were set in RFC822 (1982) and restated in RFC2822 (2001). Yes
decades. Really.
As another poster pointed out, threading is therefore maintained even
after someone changes the header, so in the long list of "MODERATED:",
the lineage of a thread is maintained.
The problem then, if someone starts a new question by changing
subject, their message could well be ignored. Often when sorting by
thread, the threads are collapsed, except those threads you expand to
read. So, if only the first message of a thread is "visible", the
changed subject is "invisible" until that thread and all of its messages
are expanded. This is why "hi-jacking" is considered a bad thing, and
not merely and issue of netiquette.
Some clients offer the ability to sort by subject as well as
thread. Thunderbird is indeed a more enlightened client than most.
Nice try, the two standards you mention are for message syntax. They
are what make the practice you prefer possible, not standard.
Further, you and others do have some good reasons for your preference.
However, I don't think there is any standards body that addresses this
issue specifically, and if there were, standards are generally
convenient, not enforceable. One might say that the Microsoft .doc
format was a "standard" and yet one might prefer to use something else.
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