OT - the OT tag and the Re bug.

On Mon, 28 May 2007 11:09:00 GMT, "Neil Gould" wrote in
:

I was asking how you arrived at the conclusion that Outlook Express was
one of the apps that "did the wrong thing". As you can tell from the
headers, I'm using OE. Notice that I also modified the subject to include
a couple more colons, which, as you can see, were posted correctly. So...
how was it that you concluded that OE "did the wrong thing"?

The OE bug is generated by the first person using OE
to reply to a post that begins with "OT:" (or any other
combination of letters other than "".

Once you have "" in the subject line, OE ignores the
rest of the line.

The purpose of eliminating non-"Re" strings ending with a colon
at the beginning of a subject line is to get rid of foreign
language equivalents of "". One "Re" at the beginning of
the line is sufficient.

The well-behaved newsreaders evidently check the first
component so that "OT:" remains intact. OE evidently trims
the first component without checking and substitutes ""
for it.

This is an extremely difficult subject to search for, since
the words involved in the concept are so ordinary.

Here's an example of a discussion of the bug/featu

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.autos.toyota/browse_frm/thread/6bd5c4dbbd550a04/f6b23cfc83d72953?lnk=st&q=outlook+bug+usenet+subje ct&rnum=2#f6b23cfc83d72953

http://tinyurl.com/ypdlpd

FWIW, you might want to make a mental note that Jim Logajan
has been around Usenet for a long time. He has undoubtedly
observed the strange splitting of threads in other groups,
as have I, and wondered why it happened. So have those
who are trying to write standards for Usenet news servers
and newsreaders:

http://www.landfield.com/usefor/2004/Mar/index.html

My favorite subject line on that page is " Sv: Ant: Sv: Antwort: ",
although the post itself is not as funny as the subject.
It does show the problem that Outlook's rule is trying to
avoid--the meaningless multiplication of things that
mean "Re".

Marty
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