Re: [Nmh-workers] Format function to create wrapped header lines?

[Bob Carragher]

On Mon, 05 Sep 2016 19:15:03 -0400 Ken Hornstein <address@hidden> sez:

> >FWIW, when I see a draft with References that is getting a bit
> >long, I just (manually) delete all the stuff in the middle) -
> >that is, leave in the oldest (one or two) and the most recent
> >(one or two) and delete everything in between - no-one has
> >ever complained about my messages breaking any threading
> >schemes (in fact, does anyone actually use References for
> >that, rather than just In-Reply-To and Subject ?)
> 
> Actually ... yes.  At least some of the complainers are on this
> list!
> 
> http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/nmh-workers/2015-08/msg00047.html
> 
> (And that's not the only message regarding that).

Hm, you might want to start counting me as someone using the
References: header.

It hadn't occurred to me before, but I might start using this to
try to defeat a particularly overly zealous spam filter.  Folks
might remember me whining about Stanford University's mail filter
assigning high spam scores to emails that I send there.  At
present, I use a lorem ipsum generator to make them look less
spammy.  But I'm wondering if I can't also take one of the
reference IDs generated by the Stanford mail server for the same
purpose (and save folks the trouble of ignoring my lorem)?

(Strictly speaking, I wouldn't *need* the References: header for
that, as I could just "harvest" IDs from the "In-reply-to"
headers of messages I've already sent.  But a single References:
header from a single message is also useful those times when I
need to start multiple new threads at once.)

> >If it isn't already done though, this header (and all others)
> >ought to be wrapped if it (they) ends up being too long for
> >the std when the message is posted (and that needs to happen
> >regardless of what format the message was in when created as a
> >draft, as the user may have added thousands of references on a
> >single header line - or made a huge Subject: or Comments:
> >header as one line, or listed the whole club's e-mail
> >addresses in the From:  or ...)
> 
> Hm.
> 
> This actually suggests to me that having this done in the
> format engine is wrong, and the RIGHT place to do it is inside
> of mhbuild, which is the tool that converts a draft file (which
> doesn't technically have to be in RFC 5322 format) into a valid
> RFC 5322 message, and we should do that for a number of
> headers.  I suspect that might be too much for 1.7, though.
> Due to liberal use of %(formataddr), we're mostly fine for
> address headers.
>
> Would people be happy with that?

I would *love* something that splits up that line in draft
messages I'm editing.  I participate in some very long threads,
and I've managed to reach the point in some of them where my
80x80 xterm does not contain enough characters to display the
entire References: header.  B-)  (At least it hasn't managed to
crash vim(1) on me.  B-)

I've thought about doing this automatically, but was concerned
that that would create an RFC 5322 non-compliant messeage.

Thanks!  B-)

                                Bob