Re: References in forwarded messages

On Fri, Aug 21, 2026 at 16:57 +0200, Alejandro Colomar via Mutt-dev wrote:

>When I forward a message, I want to have it threaded under the original
>mail.  For that, I manually add either an In-Reply-To or a References
>(depending on my mood that day, I guess) to have it threaded by mutt(1).
>
>I often forget to do this, so it would be nice if mutt(1) would do it
>automatically.

I think Mutt should not do that, because a forwarded message is not a 
reply. Those two message types are used for different purposes. 
Conflating them would cause confusion and frustration.

Alejandro claims that RFC 5322 justifies this. He said:

>RFC5322 says that reply messages SHOULD have "In-Reply-To:" and
>"References:" fields as appropriate.
>
>However, it doesn't anywhere say that other messages shouldn't have
>them.  Thus, my proposed extension would be conforming (not required,
>not even suggested, but technically conforming).

Anything not specifically forbidden is fine? No.

I own a car; the manufacturer doesn't specifically forbid me to drive 
it into a river. Does that mean I should?

The proposed change is a misuse of those headers. I suppose RFC 5322 
doesn't specifically forbid it because the authors didn't think they 
had to spell it out.