On Mon, 28 Jul 2008 07:47:04 -0500, "Swingman" wrote:

With the advent of the civilized, considerate, practice of marking "off
topic" messages "OT" hereabouts (apparently an excellent practice, in most
of our opinions), many have noted that replies to the original messages in a
"Thread" so marked do not retain the all important "OT" designation.

In most cases this is actually the result of the OP using a reserved
"control character" to delineate the "OT", such as the colon in "OT:".

In an attempt to conform to RFC Internet protocols, many mail/news clients
strip out what are considered "encoded words" and/or other characters that
precede, without a space, these control characters that are used to
terminate/modify message header information.

(See RFC #822, and others, for more information on the structure of header
fields)

Some newsreaders follow protocol, some do not, (recent versions of OE do
this routinely, while most versions of Forte Agent do not), so to insure
your original message contains the off topic designation, it is a good
practice to NOT use a ":" immediately preceding the "OT:", thusly, in the
subject header of your OT marked messages if you wish all threaded replies
to remain marked "OT".

Strictly FWIW ... YMMV

Curiously enough, RFC 822 does not address the issue of the embedded
colon in the subject line at all. In fact it specifically defines the
subject as an unparsed text string. As best I can recall from many
years ago the "proper" method of dealing with a modifier in the
subject was to test for the colon and, if present do nothing, if not
present to prepend a "" at the beginning. When properly implemented
you can use "OT:" and follow-ups will come out as "OT:". If poorly
implemented you get " OT:". I haven't the time to try to search out
what is really the desired behavior, but clearly one that allows for
tagging posts as "OT:" is better behaved than one that forces you to
use "OT - " or some such, producing " OT - " in the follow-ups.
Granted, a properly threading newsreader will not be fooled, but I
don't think that OE threads properly anyway. Forte gives the option of
threading on subject.

Your point about using something other than the colon following the OT
is well taken, but the reason why it misbehaves is, I believe,
somewhat different from your explanation.

Tim Douglass

http://www.DouglassClan.com

"I'm not exactly burned out, but I'm a little bit scorched and there's some smoke damage."