Subject: (bad) i18n of "Re:" usage in "Subject:"

From: Peter Koch <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 04 Nov 1998 20:08:30 +0100

There are some MUAs which kind of localize certain message headers
when presenting them to the user, e.g. by translating "subject",
"from", "to" to the local language equivalent. This may be a good
idea and will not affect interoperability as long as the correct keywords
appear "on the wire".

The "Re:" usage, described in draft-ietf-drums-msg-fmt-05.txt, 3.6.5,
is a special case in that "Re:" is a keyword but not a field name.

Some implementations now even "translate" the "Re:" and put the result into
the reply message. In German this translation often reads "AW", a non-standard
abbreviation for "Antwort" (answer). Non-localized clients have no chance
of recognizing this token, so we end up with a chain of Re: AW: Re: AW: ...
in the "Subject:" field unless cleaned up manually.

Although it is just a convention I'd like to suggest the wording in 3.6.5
be amended by a phrase like:

  No different reply indicator SHOULD be used. In particular the use of
  any form of translation of "Re:" is deprecated.

-Peter

---

From: Simon Lyall <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 09:15:03 +1300 (NZDT)

It is "Re: " with the space. Here is what we have in the usefor draft:

5.4. Subject

          The Subject field contains a short string identifying the
          topic of the message. When used in a followup, the field body
          SHOULD start with the string "Re: " ( a "back reference" )
          followed by the contents of the pure-subject of the precursor.

          subject-content = [ back-reference ] pure-subject CRLF
          pure-subject = nonblank-text
          back-reference = %x52.65.3A.20        ; which is a case-sensitive
                                                 "Re: "

          The pure-subject MUST NOT begin with "Re: ". The default
          subject-content of a followup is the string "Re: " followed by
          the contents of the pure-subject of the precursor. Any leading
          "Re: " in the pure-subject MUST be stripped.

          Followup agents SHOULD remove instances of non-standard
          back-reference (such as "Re(2): ", "Re:", "RE: ", or "Sv: ")
          from the subject-content when composing the subject of a
          followup and add a correct back-reference in front of the
          result.

          Followup agents MUST NOT use any other string except "Re: " as
          a back reference. Specifically, a translation of "Re: " into a
          local language or usage MUST NOT be used.

          Agents SHOULD NOT depend on nor enforce the use of back
          references by followup agents.  For compatibility with legacy
          news software the subject-content of a control message MAY
          start with the string "cmsg ", non-control messages MUST NOT
          start with the string "cmsg ".

-- 
Simon J. Lyall.  |   Very  Busy  |   Mail: [email-masked]
"To stay awake all night adds a day to your life" - Stilgar | MT.

---

From: Lars-Johan Liman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 05 Nov 1998 14:33:41 +0100

>   any form of translation of "Re:" is deprecated.

... and add to that that the leading "Re: " in a subject line SHOULD
NOT be encoded in any other encoding than 7bit.

(Some MUA:s encode the entire subject line in QP or B64, including the
leading "Re: ", giving the other end a hard time to figure out that it
is a reply.)

				Best regards,
				  /Liman
#-------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Lars-Johan Liman			 ! Internet: [email-masked]
# Ebone/NORDUnet/SUNET Operations Centre ! HTTP    : //www.sunet.se/~liman
# Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden	 ! Voice   : Int +46 8 - 790 65 60
#-------------------------------------------------------------------------

---

From: "D. J. Bernstein" <[email-masked]>
Date: 5 Nov 1998 16:26:33 -0000

Simon Lyall writes:
> It is "Re: " with the space.

Are you sure about that?

BSD mail creates a reply subject as follows:

   (1) Strip all leading whitespace from the original subject.

   (2) If the subject starts with "Re:" without regard to case, print
       "Subject: " and the subject.

   (3) Otherwise, print "Subject: Re: " and the subject.

elm creates a reply subject as follows:

   (1) Strip all leading whitespace from the original subject.

   (2) Change the subject to "your mail" if it is empty.

   (3) If the subject starts with "Re:" without regard to case, strip
       the "Re:" and any subsequent whitespace.

   (4) Print "Subject: Re: " and the subject.

mh creates a reply subject as follows:

   (1) If the subject starts with whitespace, or with "Re:" without
       regard to case, strip it and repeat this step.

   (2) Print "Subject: Re: " (by default) and the subject.

pine creates a reply subject as follows:

   (1) Strip all leading whitespace from the original subject.

   (2) Change the subject to "your mail" if it is empty.

   (3) If the subject starts with "Re:" without regard to case, print
       "Subject: " and the subject.

   (4) Otherwise, print "Subject: Re: " and the subject.

I also checked trn, one of the popular UNIX newsreaders. It skips "Re:"
and an optional extra space.

All these programs will see the "Re:" in "Subject: Re:Databases". Some
of them will insert a space into subsequent replies; some won't.

If you have information about other programs, please send it to the
mailing list.

---Dan
1000 recipients, 28.8 modem, 10 seconds. http://pobox.com/~djb/qmail/mini.html

---

From: Mark Delany <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 07 Nov 1998 06:49:16 -1000

>If you have information about other programs, please send it to the

Some partial info on ccMail as I just noted during some correspondence with 
someone using it (there are no headers to identify version details).

It seems that ccMail introduces a counter into Re, thusly:

	Subject: Re[4]: Thomson Trip
	...
	Subject: Re[12]: Thomson Trip

Regards.

---

From: Jamie Zawinski <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 09 Nov 1998 18:01:13 -0800

> If you have information about other programs, please send it to the

Netscape strips off everything at the beginning of the subject that
matches the regexps

	^[Rr][Ee]:[ \t]*
	^[Rr][Ee][[(][0-9]*[])]:[ \t]*

that is, any number of occurences of "Re:" or "Re[99]:" or "Re(99):",
plus trailing whitespace, case-insensitively.

It canonicalizes the subject in this way before displaying it in the
message list window, but displays the original text unaltered in the
message body window.  To construct a reply subject, "Re: " is prepended
to the subject thus stripped.

The actual code can be seen at
http://cvs-mirror.mozilla.org/webtools/lxr/source/lib/libmsg/msgutils.c#224

The parsing of the Subject field is definitely not subject to
localization, and I *think* that the presentation of the "Re:" 
string also is not.

Replies to messages with empty subjects will be "Re: ".

When the user tries to send a message with an empty subject, they
are prompted for a subject, with the default one being the string
"(no subject)".  They have the opportunity to delete that text and
really send a blank subject if they want.

-- 
Jamie Zawinski
[email-masked]    http://www.mozilla.org/   (work)
[email-masked]        http://www.jwz.org/       (play)