OT: The joys of email (was: Re: CONLANG/ZBB crossover)

* Philip Newton said on 2007-05-09 09:32:22 +0200
> On 5/9/07, taliesin the storyteller <taliesin-conlang@...> wrote:
> > Same reason that you on some international mailing lists get
> > chains on the form Re: Ant: Aw: Re(5): Sv: in front of the
> > subject-line.
>
> Well, the reason for that is that some software decides that
> Latin "re:" is not Latin, but English, and should be
> translated into local languages.
Never thought it could be seen as latin at all, neat!

> (Or a point could be made that it's not even Latin, but a
> syntactic token in "RFC-2822-ese" which should be left alone
> -- much as one does not translate, say, "From:" or "Subject:"
> in the headers of a message.)
This is what 'Re:' is, yes, though it isn't in any RFC. Btw,
some email-programs[*] translate *all* the headers... imagine
the fun of tracing errors when you need to run the headers (if
they are kept at all) through a translation-program first...

The underlyingly reason is of course that newer email-programs
didn't even attempt to copy what existing email-programs were
doing[*], or they originated on some other net than the Internet
and kept their idiosyncrasies instead of adapting properly when
they were ported over. This seems to be the underlying cause of
much of what is problematic with email as a whole today.


[*] Saying "Microsoft" here is quite redundant but the weather
is terrible outside and I need to vent. Global warming is
supposed to turn Norway into the new Mediterranaen but right now
it looks more like "the planet of eternal rain".


t., who gets paid to kill spam

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