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