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

[Robert Elz]

    Date:        Mon, 05 Sep 2016 11:58:09 -0400
    From:        Ken Hornstein <address@hidden>
    Message-ID:  <address@hidden>

  | It's not the stuff in mhl.headers that I care about, it's what appears
  | in the draft reply message; that's where this would show up.

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 ?)

I did that here (though there weren't really enogh refs to require it, and
I would not normally have bothered.)

Sometimes I even add entries to References, when I am reply to one message
and quote from another that is not in the current thread.  No-one seems
to object to that either.

For all this, having the References be on one header line makes the editing
slightly easier, but the difference is insignificant (I expect, having
not actually encountered one I remember that has been wrapped in the draft...).

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 ...)

  | With regards to what Ralph said ... AFAICT, space-splitting tokens in
  | a References: header should be fine.

Yes, it is, and comments in any structured header are fine too, and legal
- they're legal in unstructured headers too, they're just not comments then...

kre

ps: my assumption about the way that References ought to be used, in a
really good MUA mail reader (particularly a GUI reader) is to generate a
menu of related messages for the user to go read - once at one of those,
the user can go forward/backward in the thread to find others that weren't in
the References of the original message.   Ideally, when sending a message
the thread head, most recent (same as in-reply to) and any messages that
contain content actually referred to in the message would be in References,
and nothing else .. but getting that right (even manually) is HARD.