prefixing subjects in mailing list posts considered harmful

[Greg Stark]

Putting a prefix on every subject is, frankly, idiotic.

Mail readers can filter, label, tag, highlight or otherwise control the display of mail based on actual headers like the list headers or envelope sender which will reliably catch the correct messages.

Mangling the subjects is error-prone -- consider if someone forwards or replies personally to a list post. The result would be incorrectly marked as still being on the list when it wasn't. Worse, consider what happens when messages are crossposted and different people reply to messages delivered through different lists. I've often seen "Re: [foo] Re: [bar] Re: [foo] Re: [bar] ...". This is just a very bad, poorly thought out unscalable buggy protocol.

And it's also really really annoying. I have a screenful of "Re: [Maria-developers]" in my summary list repeated over and over again and no subject content listed at all because the prefix has crowded them all out!

Note that mailman actally exposes a per-user option to disable this behaviour though launchpad has hidden it. That's still bad since it means replies from other users have the mangled subject. Threaded clients usually keep the original subject but that depends on the order that messages are received and so on. I fully support not exposing that "feature" but only if you fix the default to be off as it properly should be for this misbegotten abomination.

[William Grant (wgrant)]

I agree. I've often been tempted to write something into my filters to strip the '[Launchpad-users]' out of subject lines on the one slightly-used Launchpad list I'm on. Few Ubuntu lists do crazy things like this.

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

I agree, this is very annoying. It is bad enough that bugs get the bug number put in the subject, but now that I have joined ubuntu-bugcontrol I'm having a very hard time now browsing my bugs mail folder when all of the subject lines start with "[ubuntu-bugcontrol] [bug #nnnnnnn]". Please strip this down to just the bug subject line. If I need to know the bug number, I can see that in the body, and the header tells me it is from ubuntu-bugcontrol.