Re: Summary of Issues Raised to date

On Mar 16 2004, Mark E. Mallett wrote:
> 
> 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."
> 

The problem of tag buildup is more insidious than Re: buildup. 
When you consider an email exchange n messages deep, you can expect
n - 1 Re: tags, that's about 4*(n-1) characters of subject real estate
wasted. 

If the MUA displays threads and reorganizes subjects, that's not a big
issue, but if people are unwilling/unable to use such helpful
software, they'll lose 20 characters after n=6, or three replies on
both sides of the exchange. With an extra tag, you might be looking at
"Re:[spam] ", ie 10*(n-1), so you've lost 20 chars after one exchange
and a half, say. The real subject simply scrolls off the deep end much
faster with tags.

One solution is to put tags at the end of the subject, where it's out
of sight and you can still read the message subject easily in your
MUA. This doesn't require help from the MUA. You can also truncate the
subject arbitrarily at say 100 characters and overwrite (or only
insert) the tag there, in case you want to make reasonably sure people can
see the tag on their subject line. 

Another solution is for everyone to agree to reuse a single
tag. Whatever is in the tag is the result of the last filter in the
chain, and filters are required to do tag cleanup when they see
several tags.

sample exchange with tags (ok, good):

1) Hello
2) [ok]Hello           ---> Re:[ok]Hello
3) [good]Re:Hello      ---> Re:[good]Re:Hello
3) [ok]Re:Re:Hello     ---> Re:[ok]Re:Re:Hello


Assuming subject comparison issues are not that big a deal in general,
the last method could be fairly workable.

-- 
Laird Breyer.