The multiple "Re:" may be caused by Exchange's localization rules for
subject prefixes (and yes, I know we don't do this according to 821bis, but
that prohibition was only added to 821bis a couple of months ago, and we've
been doing it for about 4 years)....
Exchange will cause long subject lines to be folded funny because of its
header wrapping rules - since it won't allow a header line to be longer than
72 characters (since there are mailers out there that badly choke on long
header lines), it scans back in the string looking for a "reasonable" place
to fold the header lines (it looks for a word break). It will then fold the
subject using the RFC822 header line folding rules, which causes (this
example will probably not look right, because Exchange will wrap body text
at 72 characters, but the Subject: below is all on one line):
Subject: This is a message with an indescribably long subject. I don't know
why anyone would ever want to have a subject that is this long, but there
are people who will want this.
Subject: This is a message with an indescribably long subject. I
don't know why anyone would ever want to have a subject that
is this long, but there are people who will want this.
I believe that Exchange puts spaces in when it folds the lines, but it's
entirely possible that some client is changing the spaces into tabs (it's
all LWSP, right?). What I cannot explain is the level of degradation that
your subject is showing, but it's possible you are seeing a combination of
these two effects (the "Re:" expansion and the long subject line expansion.
Larry Osterman
Sent from larryo-laptop.dns.microsoft.com running NT5 and Outlook 2000
and Exchange Server 5.5. Please notify the sender of any difficulties
-----Original Message-----
From: Jacob Palme [mailto:jpalme(_at_)dsv(_dot_)su(_dot_)se]
Sent: Wednesday, March 03, 1999 3:39 AM
To: IETF mailing list on e-mail headers
Subject: Funny disruption of subject lines
I have noted that in some cases, the Subject line is split in funny ways.
For example, in a long message exchange with another person,
who has the following header in his message:
X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.0.1458.49)
and where I have been using Eudora 4.0,
the Subject line started out like this (I have translated from
Swedish to English):
Subject: Speaker in the ending of Febr. or beginning of March 99??
But the Subject in the latest messages look like this:
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Speaker in the end
ing of febr. or be ginning of March 99
??
The cause of the problem seems to be that some mailer has
split the subject into separate lines at arbitrary points,
probably because of the successive adding of "Re:" and then
merged them again, replacing the line breaks with tabs.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jacob Palme <jpalme(_at_)dsv(_dot_)su(_dot_)se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/~jpalme