On Mon, Oct 25, 2021 at 08:13:15PM -0400, John Hawkinson wrote: > Derek Martin <inva...@pizzashack.org> 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. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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