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

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Last update: 5/14/08
KarlC@ (the obvious)