subject line mangling

[Brett Dikeman]

Could people please refrain from putting "Subject:" in front of a
subject line?  Completely confuses email clients, along with the
archive software, so it's a Bad Thing.

Pretty much the standard these days is to change the subject line
with a prefix of "Re: " when responding to a message(note the space
at the end.)

We're going to be making some serious efforts to "assemble" threads
properly in the new archive software(for those who care, we're going
to try doing Jaccard Similarity ratings on the message body text when
we can't figure out from the headers what's a reply to what) but
subject line changes will still confuse it, since it only looks for
the "parent" message in a subset of messages with the same
approximate subject line...the idea will only be to fix threading
tree structure(ie, which post is a response to which of the other
posts in a particular thread) for those clients which don't including
in-reply-to headers.  It will most certainly not be able to figure
out what's going on if you change the subject line.

I suppose we can add some "smarts" to strip "Subject:" if found, but
it's just much more fun to yell at people not to do it :-)

So, the executive summary is: don't change the subject line unless
you have a darn tootin' good reason to.

Thanks!

Brett
PS:for those who care...AOL, Hotmail, and a bunch of Outlook clients
do NOT support the RFCs properly; they don't include the
"in-reply-to" OR "references" headers.  Netscape is kinda twisted,
only puts out a "references" header, which is almost as good, except
it doesn't indicate the -parent-, just all the messages text was
quoted from..though the parent may always be the first message ID
listed, haven't studied it closely to figure that one out(I probably
should.)  Eudora includes both headers, as it should.  Pine, elm,
mh/exhm all include proper header(s) as well.  In any case, it's a
serious headache when you're trying to write software that needs the
thread information :-)  I discovered that roughly more than 50% of
the messages in the last year's worth of archives for A8+200q20v
lists had no threading information because of broken email clients...
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