On Fri, 15 Feb 1991 13:37:43 +0100 Eric Thomas said:
>On Mon, 11 Feb 1991 11:46:57 GMT Alan Thew <[log in to unmask]> said:
>>He was  in fact re-posting  something and used a  Resent-subject: field.
>>This field was totally ignored by LISTSERV and indeed does not appear in
>>the notebook from the site which gateways this list to USENET.
>>However, while the  USENET header fields again use  the original subject
>>field,  the Resent-Subject:  field is  at  least present  in the  header
>>fields. I'm puzzled  as to why the field is  omitted completely from the
>>LISTSERV notebook.
>
>Simply  because there  is no  such  field defined  in RFC822,  ie if  you
>forward a message to someone, the subject stays the same (unless you edit
>the 'Subject:' field).
>  Eric
 
In RFC822, section 4.2 (Forwarding), it effectively says that unspecified
"Resent-" fields are assumed to have the same syntax as the originals,
and are assumed to be more recent than the original.  But it also says
something about such stuff being left to the implementation of a program.
Thus, in the formal sense, Eric is correct.
"Normal expectation" however would lead users to think that a field like
"Resent-Subject" would be treated like "Resent-From" *is* treated...
 
My impression is that this is a "bug" in RFC822, hopefully to be "fixed"
sometime...  And then in the implementations...
 
Regards.
Scott/