Re: META: CHAT vs OT

On 7/19/06, Sai Emrys <sai@...> wrote:
> On the FAQ - http://wiki.frath.net/Conlang-L_FAQ - it's mentioned that
> the OT: tag messes up some software.
>
> Could anyone provide details?
I wonder whether this might be Microsoft software?

For some reason, they "localise" tags; for example, German Outlook
produces "AW:" for a reply (from "Antwort", presumably from a
misguided notion that "RE:" -- or, as it's more commonly spelled in
non-MS email, "Re:" -- is from "Reply", rather than the ablative of
Latin "res") and "WG:" for a forwarded message (from
"weitergeleitet").

I imagine that any given localisation doesn't know all the tags that
all localisations can produce, and so simply interprets any two-letter
tag followed by a colon as a localised "RE:", replacing it.

So if someone sent something with "OT:" to me at work and I replied,
the reply would carry "RE:" *in place of* "OT:" rather than in
addition to it. So the tag doesn't survive any replies from Billware.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>