Re: message-subject-re

[Michael.Cook@cisco.com]

Daniel Pittman <daniel@rimspace.net> writes:

> ...and it does mean that it's not going to be possible for some email
> clients that use the subject line to sort threads to tell that your
> messages are part of one.

that's not really possible in general anyhow.  mailers and remailers
mangle subject lines in many various ways that make sorting by
subject line challenging at best.

> Er, /why/ do you want to do that?

after seeing one too many subject lines that looked like

  Subject: Re: Fwd: FW: [list-name] RE: Fwd: foo

it occurred to me that the Re prefix has no real value.  that it's
probably just a hold-over from way back before mail readers were
sophisticated enough to use the References and other headers.  one
of those things that mailers do because, well, they've just always
done it that way.  and for no other reason.  this kind of meta-data
doesn't need to be encoded into the subject line.  there are other
headers for that.

m.