JT> Actually, this is the very thing that has concerned me all
JT> along with newsgroups.  Any gated mail to fido is always
JT> addressed to "all". So you don't really know a particular message
JT> is addressed to you unless you actually read ALL the messages.

JT> I know many real news readers are threaded, so you can see
JT> the chain of replies and who started it.  Can this information
JT> be used to somehow put in the intended "TO" name?  Or is there
JT> simply not enough information in the message to do this?

RS> There usually is enough. Normally the first line of the body
RS> of the message contains who wrote what is being replied to.

RS> It should be feasible to have a reader which has a
RS> phantom To: field which doesnt actually from the header
RS> at all but has been extracted from the body of the message.

RS> There is also normally a full message ID
RS> which allows complete threading etc too.

JT> Ok, my next question is, if there IS enough information in
JT> the public message as to who that message is intended for, the
JT> WHY didn't they already write this into the gating software?

Most likely because its a lot easier to do gating software that
just does the essentials, not the fancy bits. Thats always been
the way with this end of software, whenever you install it you
can see heaps of rather obvious improvements that can be done.

Sometimes its just philosophical, those coming from ngs
just dont see the need like people coming from fido do.
They've never used the other approach much themselves.

Corse another likely reason is just that its not ALWAYS there in the first
few lines of the message. The other header stuff is more reliably there.

JT> There is more than one gating package out there,
JT> ALL of them do the same, address the message to all.

Coz thats the easiest thing to do.
@EOT:

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