question/suggestion

[John Hawkinson]

ಚಿರಾಗ್ ನಟರಾಜ್ <mailinglist at chiraag.me> wrote on Thu,  7 Oct 2021
at 23:32:00 EDT in <YV+7qtpNJ7eN74XZ at chiraag>:

> Any email client (including mobile email clients) worth its salt is
> going to wrap the subject line (at least in the email view, if not
> in the index view), so that shouldn't really be an issue, right?

My principal concern is with the index view. And none of the 4 email clients I use wrap the index view (mutt, Gmail web, Gmail mobile, Outlook web), nor would I want them to (because then they'd be taking too much vertical real estate, too).

> That's true. However, convention is *also* important,

Unsupported argument.

> and Mutt's convention is...unconventional.

Not particularly.
It's not Outlook's and it's not Gmail's, so it's not the market leader, but its difference is not particularly confusing or difficult to understand. 

> Most email systems usually use FW: at the beginning to indicate that
> the email has been forwarded (if I'm not mistaken).

No, if we're going to be pedantic.
And "not quite" if we are going to be flexible on case sensitivity.

Outlook uses "Fw: ", and Gmail uses "Fwd: ".
Between them I think they dominate the market ("most email systems").

> Why shouldn't Mutt do the same?

We should do the best we can, and if there is a situation where there is strong value in conformance, we should consider the costs and benefits to conforming. Here, I haven't seen any meaningful argument beyond the idea that the current behavor might be confusing. But I've never heard of anyone being confused by it, and my experience is that nobody is confused. You haven't even suggested that you have found a single person to be confused (and I think we'd need a lot more than one example).

Indeed, even were there confusion, it would be fleeting, because it's obvious what's going on upon viewing the context of the message, regardless of whether the "Forwarded message" text is present (as it is when mime_forward is unset).

If some people were confused, then we'd have to evaluate the seriousness of that confusion against the costs of change. Line length is one cost I articulaed. Another is that absolutely any change has a cost, and causes people to have to figure out how to get used to it. That's mostly a one-time cost and sometimes it's easy to argue it's worth it for the greater good, but that's a tough argument to make here.

But of course you're free to set your own configuration. Or we could include a sample commented line in the muttrc labelled "# Make forwarding look like Outlook's" or whatever. But I think a much more compelling case is required to change the default.

Of course, others may disagree.

--
jhawk at alum.mit.edu
John Hawkinson