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



On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 06:21:28PM +0100, Bertrand Yvain wrote:
> > 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.

Yucky.

Sure, the references header is the most accurate representation that a
given e-mail is a reply (though I'm sure there are still mail clients
in use that don't set it properly).  I don't know about you, but
I don't look at it... ever.  I still want a visual cue that the
message I'm about to read is not the first in a thread (especially if
I haven't seen the thread before... it's a clue that I was added to
the thread for some specific reason), and prepending Re: to the
subject is the well-established standard way to do that.  It's what
people expect.  Is it the end of the world if it's not there?
Obviously not, but personally I'd still rather it be there than not,
when appropriate.  

The way I see it, the subject line is for the recipient, not the
sender, and changing your copy of Mutt to eliminate the prefix will do
very little to solve your problem, since the messages you'll care the
most about are the ones you receive, not the ones you send.  Probably
no one else with whom you correspond will have a mail client that
behaves that way.  However, it may annoy your intended recipients for
lack of the expected indication that the message is a reply (though
again, I would agree with anyone who said it's not a big deal).

I do sympathize regarding other forms of header mangling. :)

I don't think this patch should be applied, and I don't think the
string that gets prepended should be configurable.  The current
behavior forcess Mutt to emit a subject that conforms to the standard
(at least this aspect of the standard), which is a Good Thing.  Since
not all clients do use "Re:" (e.g. they use "Aw:" instead), it might
be a good idea to have a variable that the user can define that lists
the possible prefixes that identify the message as a reply, so you
don't end up contributing to something like this:

  Subject: Re: Aw: Re: re: Aw: re: Aw: Fwd: Your subject is teh suck

But it should be noted that mail clients that use anything besides
"Re:" violate the standard.  And, moreover, having the string be
standard is necessary to prevent the above abomination.  Granted,
adding no prefix is not a violation of the written standard... but it
is a violation of the defacto standard, and removes a piece of
information that the recipient is expecting to be present.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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