Nathan Mehl wrote,
| Okay, perhaps I'm being dense here... the reasons for "Reply-to" being
| harmful are well-known, but how on earth does a [LISTNAME] prefix
| in the subject line make like more difficult for people with "sensible"
| list-handling procedures?
It's not as bad as clobbering Reply-To:, but it is annoying. For one thing,
many list setups that add it don't notice properly if it is already there,
so if someone replies to "[LISTNAME] real subject" with "Re: [LISTNAME] real
subject", the list changes it to "[LISTNAME] Re: [LISTNAME] real subject".
Now that Re: is not at the beginning, the next follow-up comes in as "Re:
[LISTNAME] Re: [LISTNAME] real subject", and then the list software adds a
third "[LISTNAME]".
For another, if you have an index screen of your waiting mail that shows only
the first N characters of the subject, padding it with "[LISTNAME] " allows
that much less of the real subject in view. When the tag is stuffed in three
times, the real subject is pushed completely out of the display.
Third, posters try to be helpful by inserting it themselves, but if they get
the spelling or the case or the delimiters wrong, the list software adds it
again, so you get things like "[LISTNAME] (list name)".
On the list I run, I offer tagged subject lines as an option, which right now
only one person is using. If anything resembling the list's name is already
in the subject, it is not added.
All that said, at least tagging subjects does not do irreversible damage like
clobbering Reply-To:.
