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Re: Prevent "Re: " prepending to subject when replying (patch included)



On 2009-11-19, Bertrand Yvain <pnl@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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.

Thanks for the explanations.  I had always just assumed that "Re"
was from the English "regarding" or "with regard to".  I didn't know
that it came directly from Latin.  I had also assumed that it was a
matter for localization because of mutt's inclusion of "aw" in its
default 'reply_regexp'.

> > 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.

I handle the messiness of subject lines with a fairly complex
'reply_regexp' so that my replies have only "Re: " before the
_original_ subject.  I would think that you'd want to include some
sort of reply indicator in the subject to indicate that it is a
reply, especially for the benefit of users of lesser MUAs that don't
handle or aren't configured to handle References correctly.

That said, I'm not suggesting that everyone must do as I do, so if
you still think your patch is the right solution for your situation,
I don't have any further objections.

Regards,
Gary