Re: Eliminating repetitious "Re: Re: Re: ..."

[prj@po.cwru.edu (Paul Jarc)]

I've thought of adding something like the following to nnmaildir,
although it really belongs in Gnus proper, not in backends: I look at
a group/topic paramter called, say, canonicalize-subject.  Its value
is a function.  I call that function, giving it the actual subject as
an argument.  It returns a canonicalized subject.  I use the
canonicalized subject for NOV data, but leave the original article
unmodified.

Some useful default things that could be done to the subject:
- remove "\`\(Re:|[blah]| *\)*"
- remove "(was: .*\'"
- replace " +" with " "
It looks like a hook might be more appropriate, but then the
individual functions would all have to look at a variable instead of
their arguments, and set the variable instead of return the new
subject.  Or else the functions would have to be called by a helper
function, instead of in the usual hook fashion.

The article itself should not be modified.  The canonicalized subject
should be used for thread gathering, display in the Summary buffer,
constructing replies, and maybe even article display (but not for
C-u g, of course).  If I do this in my backend by canonicalizing the
NOV subject, I'd be able to hit some of these areas, but not all.


paul