On Thursday, 31 July 2014 22:19:55 CEST, Thomas Lübking wrote:
I'm not aware on any standard on this, eg. german outlook will
send you stuff like:
WG: AW: Foo bar
Yes. Let's leave Outlook out for a while -- they break so many conventions
and standards that make it not relevant here. There's just no way we could
catch up with every broken variant, or even every spoken language. It was a
mistake to translate the Re/Fwd prefixes in there, but that's something
which we cannot avoid.
There's also
[Fwd: AW: Foo bar]
Indeed, and also "Foo bar (fwd)" as done by pine/alpine. The rules for
extracting the base subject are written in RFC5256 [1].
I'm strongly against inventing non-standard means of conveying the Fwd
counting, if only because I've seen a lot of breakage done by other MUAs
who decided to be "helpful". (I will have to have a word woth those guys
who use "| " instead of "> " for marking quoted text, for example.)
There's no actual field for forwarding (unlike in-reply-to and
resent-*) - technically it's just a new message.
Thunderbird marks them with In-Reply-To and References to preserve
threading, which is IMHO a reasonable option. It's good for situations
where you want to add a 3rd party to an existing thread. If your forwarded
message is marked as a reply, the 3rd party's replies will thread
correctly, which is a good thing.
So here's my proposal, or a pair of them, actually:
1) First option is to blindly append a Fwd, no matter what.
2) Second option is detecting Fwd and Fw prefixes, the (fwd) suffixes and
that crazy [Fwd: ...] construct, strip all of them, preserve any other
fancy stuff like Re markings, no matter how many of them are in there, also
preserve the mailing list markers, and add exactly one "Fwd: " right at the
beginning of the message.
Karan, this is your feature, so you make this call. I'll just redirect all
the praise and complaints from our countless crowd of users your way :).
Cheers,
Jan
[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5256#section-7
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