Prevent "Re: " prepending to subject when replying (patch included)
On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 09:00:54AM -0800, Gary Johnson wrote:
> On 2009-11-19, Bertrand Yvain <pnl@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > please consider this patch that adds a boolean configuration option,
> > reply_prefix. When turned off, the "Re: " prefix will not be added to
> > the subject of a reply, unless the subject was empty.
>
> As someone pointed out in another thread, maybe in mutt-users,
> mutt's hard-coded "Re: " is not very international.
"Re: " is actually international. Quoting from RFC 2822:
The "Subject:" field is the most common and contains a short string
identifying the topic of the message. When used in a reply, the field
body MAY start with the string "Re: " (from the Latin "res", in the
matter of) followed by the contents of the "Subject:" field body of the
original message. If this is done, only one instance of the literal
string "Re: " ought to be used since use of other strings or more than
one instance can lead to undesirable consequences.
This is not very normative and the phrasing is vague. To my
understanding, if a prefix were to be added it should be "Re: " which,
being latin, is not subject to localization.
> In what situation do you not want the subject of your reply to begin
> with "Re: " or your national language equivalent?
The mechanism to indicate that a message is a reply is the standard
References: header. Using a prefix leads to messy results, considering
the variety of software that do subject mangling (MUA and list
managers).
So, to answer your question: in every situation.
--
Bertrand Yvain
http://www.IELO.net/