[ih] Email behavior (better subject ID...)

[Jack Haverty]

I took a quick look at those RFCs, and the 5983 one.  RFCs 2369 and 2919 
are "proposed standards" and 5983 is labelled "Experimental". Is there 
some other place to look that indicates these were actually later 
adopted as official "standards"?

Regardless of their status, you just described exactly what I observed:  
"Lots of mail programs recognize them and do something with them "   The 
phrase "do something" doesn't sound like a definition of a standard.

Those RFCs seem to define the format of several "header fields", but say 
nothing about how the information contained therein should be used by 
mail senders, receivers, list managers, etc. as they handle mail.

An analogy might be that there are RFCs which define the format of TCP 
and IP headers.  But they also define what the software handling those 
datagrams should do with that information.  For example, the TCP header 
contains a field for Sequence number, but it also specifies what a 
program sending or receiving must do with the contents of those 
fields.   They specify the Formats and the Protocols.

Just out of curiousity, I let my mail program display all headers, and I 
looked at messages I've recently received on several dozen mailing 
lists.  Surprisingly, many contain "List-*" fields.   But some have 
several such fields, while others have only one.   Several mailing lists 
have no List-* headers at all (e.g., nextdoor.com). It appears, from my 
admittedly tiny data, that there are no standards for which of those 
headers must be created when a message is sent to a list of people.

So, "Lots of mail programs recognize them and do something with them" is 
the standard?

That's what I meant by "not being standardized or widely 
implemented/adopted."  The formats are defined; the associated 
protocol(s) are not.   (Or I'm just not aware of them, it's been a long 
time since I was involved in mail protocols.)

/Jack Haverty


On 9/3/21 8:12 PM, John Levine wrote:
> It appears that Jack Haverty via Internet-history <jack at 3kitty.org> said:
>> I didn't know about those header fields until you pointed them out. ...
>> fields.    Those headers are an example of what I meant as not being
>> standardized or widely implemented/adopted.
> Most of them were defined in RFC 2369 in 1998, List-ID by RFC 2919 in 2001.
>
> Lots of mail programs recognize them and do something with them, but
> for some reason not Thunderbird.
>
> Thunderbird seems sort of stuck, getting upgrades thrown over the wall from
> the Firefox project but still missing some fairly basic stuff like the list
> headers.
>
> R's,
> John
>
>
>> On 9/3/21 1:18 PM, Bernie Cosell via Internet-history wrote:
>>> i don't know about the links at the end, but do these links not work?
>>> {in the header of every message}
>>>
>>> List-Id: "Discussions about Internet History."
>>> <internet-history.elists.isoc.org>
>>> List-Unsubscribe:
>>> <https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/options/internet-history>,
>>> <mailto:internet-history-request at elists.isoc.org?subject=unsubscribe>
>>> List-Archive: <http://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/>
>>> List-Post: <mailto:internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
>>> List-Help: <mailto:internet-history-request at elists.isoc.org?subject=help>
>>> List-Subscribe:
>>> <https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history>,
>>> <mailto:internet-history-request at elists.isoc.org?subject=subscribe>