I wrote:
It's interesting, though, that the way Re: is used in email today,
it's associated strictly with replies; nobody uses "Re: ___"
when they first compose an email message. (In contrast to its
use in formal memos.) So its meaning in email is different from
its former meaning, and one could speculate that the change in
meaning was helped by the resemblance of "Re:" to "reply".
Whoever was looking at the RFC regarding "Re:" before, did it say
for what purpose it might be used? Did it specify replies?
To answer my own question, RFC 2822 says (as Dion Houston already noted
in part),
The "Subject:" field is the most common [of the three informational
fields] and contains a short string identifying the topic of the
message. When used in a reply, the field body MAY start with the
string "Re: " (from the Latin "res", in the matter of) followed by
the contents of the "Subject:" field body of the original message.
If this is done, only one instance of the literal string "Re: " ought
to be used since USE OF OTHER STRINGS or more than one instance can
lead to undesirable consequences.
[emphasis mine. Take that, AW! :-)]
So yes, RFC 2822 (April 2001) did specify using Re: for replies.
Incidentally, the earlier RFC 822 (Aug. 13, 1982) did not say that
explicitly, but contains an example where the Subject begins with "Re: "
and there is an In-Reply-To field.
OK, this is getting way off-topic.
Lars
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