> > This is getting silly... Indeed. > FWIW my opinion is that the words "paw" and "wow" are common enough to > be included in subject lines that have nothing to do with PAW and WOW. > One way to minimise accidentally filtering them out is to put them in > capitals. It seems that there's no one place to put the words that'll > make everyone happy - if people just stick them wherever they feel like, > I reckon the inconvenience will be shared around fairly evenly :-) > > So, I recommend "PAW" and "WOW", capitalised, anywhere in the subject line.
Unfortunately there's no single solution among those suggested so far that works for all mail clients. Simply capitalising PAW and WOW fails for most of the mail programs, because searches are generally case-insensitive. And, as mentioned above, both paw and wow are common enough (not only as words in their own right, but also as parts of words, or even from spelling errors) that there is a risk of false positive matches. Putting the colon after the word (to give PAW: or WOW:) fixes this problem. Unfortunately it then runs into a bug with at least one mail program which assumes a word followed by a colon at the start of a subject line is some variation of fwd: (or Re:, or Sv:, or ...), and removes it in any reply/followup post. The solution that seems to work in a couple of other mailing list I'm on is to use standoffs to delimit the keyword - square brackets work. This would mean that you'd put [PAW] or [WOW] somewhere on the line.
