On 2022-01-13 19:41:12 -0800, Will Yardley wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 09:42:27PM -0500, John Hawkinson wrote:
> > Although my personal preference is that this is not a knob Mutt needs,
> > I am cognizant that some other popular MUAs use "RE: " rather than
> > "Re: " and while that looks horrid to my eye, it is not obviously
> > violative of RFC5322 and some might like Mutt to be configurable to
> > match.
> [...]
> > Perhaps language from RFC5322 Sec. 3.6.5 should be imported into the
> > documentation for $reply_prefix, but even that is oddly permissive
> > ("When used in a reply, the field body MAY start with the string "Re:
> > "") and it would be weird to change it to MUST, but I suppose wcould.
>
> I looked this up as well -- since it's a "MAY", I would agree that the
> change probably does _not_ technically violate the RFC.
The context is about the subject of a topic:
The "Subject:" field is the most common and contains a short string
identifying the topic of the message.
So, the subject is not expected to change in a reply, otherwise the
reply will be regarded as a different topic. What the RFC says is
that there is an exception: "Re: " may be added before the contents
of the "Subject:" field body of the original message. I suppose that
the alternative is to leave the subject as is, without any prefix
(note that the "In-Reply-To:" header is sufficient to indicate that
this is a reply).
> While it does mention the "undesirable consequences" of people using
> other prefixes from deduplication problems, e.g.,
>
> AW: Re: RE: RE: AW: Some subject line
>
> and that in the case where it is present "only one instance ... ought to
> be used", it doesn't specifically say that other prefixes couldn't be
> used.
Using another string breaks something like a "should". Though this
is not strictly forbidden, this is regarded as a bad choice.
Imagine that any language (including those in a non-Latin script)
would like to use its own reply prefix, and the complexity to handle
that...
--
Vincent Lefèvre <vinc...@vinc17.net> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <https://www.vinc17.net/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)
