[hypermail] RE: Subject Line of Replied Messages

From: Tom von Alten <tom_vonalten_at_boi.hp.com_at_hypermail-project.org>
Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2001 09:21:58 -0600
Message-ID: <000401c11f54$b35a5480$455b270f_at_alien-nt.boi.hp.com>

Peter C. McCluskey wrote:
> The replymsg_command option or the mailcommand option controls
> this link. The default is:
> "mailto:$TO?Subject=$SUBJECT%26In-Reply-To=%26lt;$ID&gt;"

For consistency, either the '&' at the end should be '%26', or else the previous '%26' should be '&'.

The example sent by Hsu had the first two ampersands coded as %2526, that doesn't look right, either.

> I don't know whether the In-Reply-To is doing anything useful.
> Try removing that and see whether that makes it work the way you want.

I tried the clients I have handy - MSIE v5.5 to Outlook98, Netscape Communicator/Messenger v4.7, and Opera/Mail v5.12 on NT4, and Netscape v4.7 on hp-ux 10.20. None of them know what to do with the "In-Reply-To" argument as shown above, and simply include it as trailing garbage in the subject. (I have MSIE v5 on hp-ux, but it doesn't know what to do with any of mailto:, and I don't have any reason to figure out how to explain to it.)

Netscape and MSIE *did* recognize the second parameter setting when the $SUBJECT string and the In-Reply-To variable were separated by '&' rather than by '%26'. The subject was rendered correctly in the forked compose window. (I didn't see a way to enquire about the message headers while it was being composed, though, so I don't know what it actually did with the 'In-Reply-To'.)

All three mail programs recognized the second parameter setting enough to properly trim the subject string when it was rendered with NO URL-encoding. That is, as

   "mailto:$TO?Subject=$SUBJECT&In-Reply-To=<$ID>"

However, when I sent test messages, NONE of these 3 mail clients included an 'In-Reply-To' header line.

It appears that this attempt to preserve the In-Reply-To header for message threading is NOT doing anything useful, and might as well be omitted in the defaults. We might want to leave it described in comments, in case mainstream email clients and their browser connections all get with the program someday...

_____________ Hewlett-Packard Personal Storage Business Tom von Alten mailto:Tom_vonAlten_at_hp.com

          This posting is for informational purposes only.
          It is not a statement of the Hewlett-Packard Co.

Received on Tue 07 Aug 2001 05:27:51 PM GMT