From: Harald Meland

So, if I send a mail with subject Subject: Administrivia: [foo] will be changed to [bar] Mailman should change it to Subject: [foo] Administrivia: will be changed to [bar]

? I don't think messing with the subject prefix to that extent is a good idea.

First, how often are you really gonna put the list's prefix in the subject of a message to the list? Not very often. Maybe once in the lifetime of the list, if that often? Second, even if you do need to refer to the list name in the subject, you could just use quotes instead of brackets, as in:

Subject: [foo] Administrivia: "foo" will be changing to "bar"

I don't think that's really that big a deal.

Regarding stripping of consecutive "Re:" and "Fwd:" strings -- you'd still have problems with the nationalized versions of these ("SV:", "AD:", etc.) that some MUA vendors in their infinite wisdom have implemented

That's a good point. Maybe on the options page there could be a list of "subject tags" to strip from the subjects, instead of having them hard coded in the program.

I think this "problem" should be solved in the user's MUA configuration (if the user wants the subjects mangled) and/or in the archiver thread generator.

Unfortunately the MUAs out there do a crappy job of this. Look at how many messages you get with things like "Re: Fwd: RE:" in the subject. I get a lot, and it's awefully annoying.

Anyway. What would be nice would be a radio button option in the General Options to choose between the existing routine, which simply checks to see if the Prefix is already present in the subject, and a the more aggressive subject cleanup routine. Here, by the way, is a new copy of the routine which takes into account those aweful NUMBERED reply tags (as in "Re[2]:"):

# Prepend the subject_prefix to the subject line. subj = msg.getheader('subject') prefix = self.subject_prefix # If there's no subject, give it one if not subj: msg.SetHeader('Subject', '%s(no subject)' % prefix) else: # Delete all occurances of the prefix from the subject if prefix: subj = re.sub(re.escape(self.subject_prefix), '', subj) # Check to see if the message is a reply or forward prefix2 = '' if re.search('^fwd*[0-9\[\]]*: |\(fwd\)', subj, re.I): prefix2 = 'Fwd: ' if re.match('re[0-9\[\]]*: ', subj, re.I): prefix2 = 'Re: ' # Clean up all that 're:' and 'fwd: ' garbage subj = re.sub('[rR][eE][0-9\[\]]*: | *\(*[fF][wW][dD]*[0-9\[\]\)]*:* *', '', subj) # Set the new subject line in place msg.SetHeader('Subject', '%s%s%s' % (prefix, prefix2, subj))

-- Dan

Dionysos@Dionysia.org Daniel G. Delaney www.Dionysia.org/~dionysos/ PGP Public Key: /~dionysos/pgp.html