XCmail: Subject styles [Reply]

[David Pilgram]

Hi Jürgen, 

(I must admit, it would have been useful to have draft folder as I
composed this, as in writing it, I had more thoughts, so to go away and
test etc.....!)

I still cannot see why my Reply-To address was corrupted, but re-entering
it and removing the rogue address from the addressbook cured the problem.
And it only started when I fired up v2.3devel for the first time.  And
only occurred on this one account on the linux box (as checked so far).

Also, this is still on Slackware 4 partition, not tried latest version on
Slackware 8.1.

Re: counter.

I see that this works by looking for Re: or RE: or Re[n]: etc at the start
of the subject line.  It removes this, and replaces by your preference,
i.e. Re:, Re[n+1]: etc.

So if I received email from you, with Re[6]:, and I had "classic"
preference, my reply to you would be Re:  (removing the Re[6]:)

I note that it does not look for AW: which appears in some emails from
Germany, and I presume is the German equivalent for RE:

I have a couple of comments on this.  In all cases I am considering a
"thread" of correspondance bouncing back and forth between two people.

1.  xcmail may be doing this clever parsing of the subject line, but what
will other mailers, such as outlook express do?  I suspect at least some
will see Re[6]:  and put a new Re: in front, to make

Re: Re[6]:

Xcmail, when I make my reply, does make this 

Re[8]:

but as a number, is it strictly correct?  It depends whether you count the
correspondance from both, or just your own, and as to how the other
person's mailer program responds to Re[6] - but see below.

I can, at some point, do a test with outlook express, but it is not the
only other mailer program, and I assume that you have considered this with
various mailers.  After all, the whole world does not (yet) use xcmail.


2.  This is a much more personal opinion.  I like the counter, but like
many people prefer to have this as a suffix to the subject, for example

Subject [2]

and no Re: prefix at all.  It's what I would prefer, not what I always
do...

The stripping off of the Re: and putting the counter afterwards is, I
think, not difficult or significant change.  If, however, you do not think 
it worthwhile for a general release, can you point me to where I needed to 
patch the code so I can do it for myself?

However, in this case (possibly?), maybe counter would have to ignore the other 
person's leading Re: (see point 1 above), and only increment the suffix counter.
This, I think, really does run into personal preference, and may equally
well be true for counter in the prefix with the Re: [n] choice.

So you would get (if you start correspondance)

Subject
Re: Subject
Subject [2]
Re: Subject [2]
Subject [3]

or, if other person starts correspondance

Subject
Subject [1]
Re: Subject [1]
Subject [2]


There is a minor drawback with this, and it is the special case of you replying 
to a subject for the first time, as shown here:  Subject [1] is a
confusing way for a reply subject to be labelled.  One way 
around this n=1 case is to generate the subject line suffix as

Subject
Subject [Reply]
Re: Subject [Reply]
Subject [2]


Or some other word at user's choice.  For n=2 etc, then reverts to the
number as above.


But this is probably getting too complicated for a general program; if the
suffix counter works as above, then anyone wanting this can type it in at
the subject line, as, after all, in a long thread, they would only have to
do this once.

I hope this is comprehensible!

Regards,

David Pilgram