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 * ..... No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings ..... * * ENCRYPTED email preferred -- OpenPGP key ID: 0x 758F8749 BDE9ADA6 * * ASCII Ribbon Campaign: Against HTML mail, proprietary attachments *
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