[rt-users] Re: Sqwebmail removes [...] from Subject (Interoperability between Courier and RT)

[acli@ada.dhs.org via news-to-mail gateway]

In article <20021228032617.GA22837 at binand.cysphere.com>,
Binand Raj S. <binand at gmx.net> wrote:
>
>Sqwebmail, when replying to a mail, removes \[[^\]]*\] (hope I
>got that correct :) from the Subject: header. The reasoning is
>that [...] is used only by mailing lists; hence when replied
>if the reply goes back to the mailing list the mailing list
>software restores the tag anyway, and if the reply goes back to
>the sender the tag is nonexistent.

I dug through my old mails to see what kinds of mails have square
brackets in the Subject header. This is what I find (in chronological
order):

1. Things that people typed manually ([Q], [official], [members],
   [PATCH], [SUM], [SUMMARY], [for FIOGETOWN], [Windows 95], etc.)

2. Newsgroup voting results

3. Forwarded mails (pine, mutt, ancient versions of Netscape, etc.)

4. Parts of proper names (e.g., typo[media] 98)

5. Mailing list traffic (but not before 1996, as I mentioned in
   my other reply)

6. Ticketing systems (Bugzilla, SourceForge, RT [of course], and
   some unknown ticketing system used by the ESNIC)

I would say if Sqwebmail removes all \[[^\]]*\] in Subject, it
will definitely confuse users if they do (1) or (3) (especially
for the pathetic case of the sender user agent being, e.g.,
mutt, where the entire Subject line would disappear; obviously
the Sqwebmail user will not be very happy), or if they encounter
(4).

In any case, this clearly shows that the "[...] is used only by
mailing lists" reasoning is presumptious and entirely unfounded.



(It might be interesting to see what Sqwebmail will do when the
Subject line contains ISO-2022 or Big5 multi-byte characters
that *look* like they have [...] in them; most webmail packages
I have seen act pretty badly when fed Chinese/Japanese mails;
perhaps I should get a copy of Courier just to see what it will
do )-:




-- 
Ambrose Li  <a.c.li at ieee.org>
http://ada.dhs.org/~acli/cmcc/  http://www.cccgt.org/

DRM is theft - We are the stakeholders