On Mon, 10 Jul 2017, grok (caleb vines) wrote: > Internet messaging standards (RFC 2822) allow up to 998 characters in > a subject line. Gmail and other web clients usually truncate around > 255. Considering that, is allowing report or announcement text in the > subject line a precedent we're okay with? Is there other precedent to > guide us on that subject? (pun DEFINITELY intended)
Subject lines are "weak" in terms of effect and need message-body provided context to function. Some principles (not looking up the precedents right now, but I can if need be): If the message body disagrees with the subject line, the message body always wins. Subject lines can be "quoted for context" in message body. For example, you can say in the message body "I CFJ on the statement in the Subject" and have it work. But you can't have a blank message body with "I CFJ on...X" in the Subject and have it work. I don't think truncation issues have come up. None of this answers whether you can use a Subject line to Title something, because maybe the message body provides enough context to infer that the subject line contains the title. That seems like a grey area to me.
