question/suggestion

[Derek Martin]

On Thu, Oct 07, 2021 at 11:52:02PM -0400, John Hawkinson wrote:
> 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).

I completely agree with this.

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

Hardly... "Principle of least surprise" is so well understood a design
principle that not explicitly mentioning it can hardly be considered
failing to support the argument.  It's very nearly a tautology:
Honoring convention is one of the most obvious ways to avoid
surprising the user.

> > and Mutt's convention is...unconventional.
> 
> Not particularly.

I completely disagree with this.  The length of time and extensiveness
of context in which I've used e-mail suggests that it's pretty
unconventional, even amongst Mutt users, despite it being the default.

> > 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. 

The benefit of conforming is:

  1. Principle of least surprise.
  2. Clearly indicates the message is forwarded with a relative
     minimum of extra information (minimal subject line pollution).
  3. Avoids additional pollution of the subject line with redundant
     information (the original sender's e-mail address).

When Mutt forwards a message it produces an attribution line, which by
default contains the original sender's address.  It need not be in the
subject line--in fact it has no place there, as it has nothing to do
with the subject, and only pollutes that already real-estate-deprived
field.  That is, unless the forwarder feels the need to call out the
identity of the original sender, as more important than the actual
content of the message, which can happen but should be exceedingly
rare.  Presumably what is being said is far more important than who
originally said it, in the vast majority of cases.

I've had my forward_format set for so long I'd forgotten it wasn't
what the Mutt default was, as I suspect most people have.  I think it
was set in one of the typical places people copy their base Mutt
configs from, and I, like probably many Mutt users, simply copied it.

That brings us to the purpose of defaults:  Good default configuration
values should save the typical user time and reduce exceptional cases,
making your software easier and less time-consuming to configure for
the most people, and easier to support for developers, by reducing the
likelihood that some obvserved bug is caused by some obscure setting
that really ought not to have been set.  This is, FWIW, in large part
why I have vehemently argued against configuration variables being
added to Mutt for the last ~25 years, except when there's a clear case
of benefitting a fair number of users.  The fewer variables you have,
the less of this is possible.

Cost?  I see no cost, other than the time needed to physically check
in the change, and the small chance of botching the change along with
the consequences of that.  As far as I can tell using some variation of
Fwd: %s is what the overwhelming majority of e-mail users are already
doing.  I would personally prefer "Fwd" to "FW" because years of
admin/support cause me to associate the latter with firewalls.  It's
slightly less ambiguous at the cost of one character.  In the context
of a subject line, a leading "fwd" (regardless of case) is very
unlikely to be confused with anything else, due to ubiquity of the
convention.

I don't know if this warrants the effort to change the default;
however if someone is intent on making a change, I think that the
above makes the case that it should be "Fwd: %s" (or some similar
variation of an abbreviation of "forward").

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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