| |
This broken thread garbage has got to stop. Example:
http://news.lugnet.com/general/?n=22916
http://news.lugnet.com/news/raw.cgi?lugnet.general:22916
(And countless other examples in the .loc.au group.)
The question is, how do I detect this broken mailer that Ben's using?
It reports itself as:
X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2448.0)
which I was hoping would be a unique identifier to it, but I found a message
that Larry posted which contained:
X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21)
(different version or build numbers -- whatever they are). OTOH, that message
is *also* thread-broken. He must've posted it from some broken mail-relay
station?
One solution (the goal being of course to reject broken messages from this
mailer) would be to look at the above header -- if that's safe enough.
Hmm, grepping quickly in .general, I also see:
http://news.lugnet.com/news/raw.cgi?lugnet.general:2437
http://news.lugnet.com/news/raw.cgi?lugnet.general:2461
[etc.]
with:
X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2232.9)
and this:
http://news.lugnet.com/news/raw.cgi?lugnet.general:20718
with the same version number that BenW is using. In all cases of messages
posted by this mailer to .general (a few dozen), threading was broken.
Another solution might be to reject messages whose subjects begin with
/^[Rr][Ee]:/
and have no 'References:' headers -- and not check the 'X-Mailer' header.
Unfortunately, while that would probably work, it wouldn't be long before
someone figured out that they could just delete the 'Re:' part to sneak
around it -- which would be even worse than the bug all by itself.
Thoughts?
--Todd
|
|
Message has 3 Replies:
 | | Re: Broken mailers which mess up threading
|
| (...) I'd say that's perfectly in line with with RFC 850, Section 2.2.6. It clearly says that a References: headers is "required for all follow-up articles" and that the first four characters of the Subject: header should be changed to "Re: " if (...) (24 years ago, 10-Oct-00, to lugnet.admin.nntp)
| | | Re: Broken mailers which mess up threading
|
| (...) This Larry? Can you post the URL, I will take a look at it and tell you what the circs were. I make it a practice not to reply via email EVER but always use the web (or very rarely, NNTP via NS comm 4.7 from my home PC) to reply. (...) I don't (...) (24 years ago, 10-Oct-00, to lugnet.admin.nntp)
|
14 Messages in This Thread:
 
 
- Entire Thread on One Page:
- Nested:
All | Brief | Compact | Dots
Linear:
All | Brief | Compact
|
|
|
|
