Re: Summary of Issues Raised to date

On Tue, Mar 16, 2004 at 07:41:45AM -0500, Philip Miller wrote:
> Laird Breyer wrote:
> This comment brings to mind another issue:
> How should tags in the subject following 'Re:' be treated? From the end
> recipient's point of view (I guess the that would be conversation-initiator
> in this case), it seems correct in msot cases to remove such tags. Such a
> user doesn't care how his correspondent tags his messages. Also, in terms of
> threading with outgoing messages, it's easier if the response subject lines
> up with the originally transmitted subject.

Well there are tags and there are tags.  A tag such as "[asrg]" might
be inserted by mailing list software, and the recipient probably
wouldn't remove that.  A receipient's filter might add tags such as
"[spam]" next to, inside of, or replacing any existing tag.


> I note that looking at the subject is the last real step of that threading
> algorithm. It should be a simple matter of programming (:-)) to make it
> ignore any tags it sees, once there is a standard for their construction, or
> correlate them, for that matter.

Yeah the subject comparison is a last resort.  In most cases the
References and In-Reply-To fields will be preserved so threading will
still work.  For the other cases I suspect that some
subject-comparitor algorithms will break; but I also suspect that
most will be mended with some more intelligent normalizing code.


> 
> >- The tags can be skipped by the originating algorithm, but
> >  independent filters have no way of recognizing them (ie the [,]
> >  markers are much too common in mail subjects)
> 
> That's why we should come up with a standard for the construction of these 
> tags.

Couple that with a recommendation about fallbacks when attempting to
compare subjects, similar to the one that says to skip over zero or
more "Re:"  strings.  e.g., "when comparing subjects for fall-back
threading, initial substrings matching "Re: ", then "\[.*\]", are
iteratively skipped until either a positive match is attained, or
until the comparison fails."


mm