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Re: standardized method of changing reply-subject



On 15 Dec 2008 22:11 +0100, by ssizarit@xxxxxxxxx (Melisizwe Dubaku):
> I'm thinking about changing the subject of a thread, and have asked
> myself if there maybe
> is a proven method for doing so. For example, given the subject line
> is "Meeting next week",
> I would change it to "Meeting cancelled [was: Meeting next week]".
> Maybe some mail-clients
> have a way of handling this kind of situation, I don't know.

If you can trust that all recipients use clients that implement
_proper_ threading based on the Message-ID/References/In-Reply-To
headers (such as mutt does), you can simply replace the subject line.
Where it shows up in message listings will still provide the recipient
with information about which thread it belongs to, if they have
threading enabled in their MUA.

Failing that, or even given it (especially if the subject line is
short), I have never seen any "standard" way of changing a subject
line. Even the people who care to keep the subject line in sync with
the discussion, which is surprisingly few outside of technically
oriented discussion groups, often have their own way. Unless otherwise
called for in the name of clarity, which is really the only thing that
matters in the absence of a specific policy, I tend to go with the
format "Re: new subject, was old subject" (cutting out any reply or
forward prefixes from the old subject line), but I have seen people
use semicolons, include the old subject without any indication that it
is such, in parenthesis, square brackets, and probably some other
variants as well that I cannot think of off the top of my head. Of
course, this implies that when replying to such a post, the person
replying should cut out the old subject, which certainly does not
always happen.

In your particular case, I would probably simply change the subject
line to "Meeting next week - CANCELLED", relying on threading and
quoting if the recipient needs more context. "Object - deviation" is a
pretty good rule of thumb when it works.

-- 
Michael Kjörling .. michael@xxxxxxxxxxx .. http://michael.kjorling.se
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