On Mon, Oct 25, 2021 at 08:13:15PM -0400, John Hawkinson wrote:
> Derek Martin wrote on Mon, 25 Oct 2021
> at 19:00:12 EDT in <20211025230012.gc9...@bladeshadow.org>:
>
> > Cost? I see no cost, other than the time needed to physically check
>
> My Oct. 7 email, to which you replied, enumerated several costs that I
> perceived.
> That you go on to state that you perceive no costs, without
> addressing the costs explicitly raised by others
I did actually, at some length. You enumerated two: Subject line
length, and mantenance/usability concerns. Regarding line length, I
indicated I agree entirely, and also later pointed out this lends
support to dropping the address from the subject line by default...
Regarding the second, you yourself already had pointed out it's a
one-time change, which I felt no need to repeat. I did explicitly say
I strongly suspect that a large majority of Mutt users have already
set forward_format to something akin to what I was proposing--directly
implying it very likely would be a no-op for many if not most users.
I also pointed out the ubiquity of having "Fw:" or "Fwd:" at the start
of the subject, from which it follows that this is not something that
users would need to "figure out how to get used to..."
So yes, I addressed both of your enumerated perceived costs, though
perhaps I did not spell out that I was doing so as expressly as you
apparently needed.
[I also doubt very much that most users care AT ALL how forwarded
messages get attributed by default. I myself only care what the
default is because I care about design principles in general, and
specifically their application to Mutt, and see "Fwd: %s" as a better
default from a design perspective for reasons I've already argued.]
> I'm not clear if there the proposal on the floor is the initial one
> to add Fw:, or the subsequent one to "conform" to Gmail and Outlook
> by removing the email address
I admit this could've been made clearer. I nearly sent clarification
of that after I sent that, but decided the intent was clear enough
from what I said, if the reader read the whole message, since I
explicitly stated what I supported in the last paragraph.
> To add something new without repating my prior comments: I find
> value in having the address of originator of the forwarded message
> appear in the Subject line, because it makes clear, deep into an
> ensuing thread, that "we're talking about [Steve]'s message."
It's easy enough to infer this from your argument, and I already
addressed this point as well. The address is already in the
attribution (and typically again in quoted envelope headers), so it's
redundant; redundant info has no additional value, by definition. You
might argue it saves you the cost of pressing enter to render the
first screenful see the attribution, but that's just about as close to
zero cost as it gets. Slightly more expensive over IMAP but typically
not much. In almost a decade of supporting e-mail users, not one ever
asked me if there was a way to get the original sender's e-mail in the
subject line (regardless of their chosen e-mail client). I don't
think in the typical case it has any value whatsoever to the typical
user.
An additional point, which I did not make, is that in a long thread as
you describe, there are likely multiple messages from the same sender,
all of which may have been forwarded, and any of which may have been
forwarded multiple times, leading to cases where the e-mail address in
the subject line truly adds no useful context, and may even detract
from it if that info is somehow valuable to the user. It does not
uniquely identify which message from that sender was forwarded, nor
does it even accurately indicate who the author of the principal
content actually was. It merely indicates who the last person who
touched the thread was when your sender forwarded the message.
> > In the context of a subject line, a leading "fwd" (regardless of
> > case) is very unlikely to be confused with anything else, due to
> > ubiquity of the convention.
>
> Confusion seems a red herring. No one has credibly suggested that
> any of the options, current or extent, proposed or in use, are
> confusing to anyone at all.
I specifically called out the case of FW: (which may well refer to
firewalls, and indeed in messages I frequently received in the past
did mean exactly that.) So not a red herring, though YMMV, and I
would certainly agree that my (genuine) past confusion was fleeting,
but nonetheless did occur on a somewhat regular basis, as the manager
of my company's firewalls.
--
Derek D. Martinhttp://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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