Re: [gentoo-user] proper subject lines

[Mick <michaelkintzios@gmail.com>]

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On Monday 14 July 2008, Willie Wong wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 07:11:05PM +0200, Penguin Lover Alan McKinnon 
squawked:
> > On Sunday 13 July 2008, Mick wrote:
> > > Anyway, as others asked - how long is too long for this purpose?
> >
> > for obvious reasons, anything longer than 80 characters
>
> Just to be pedantic:
>
> Remember that the mailing list prepends the list name, so I think it
> ought to be
>
> 80 - strlen("[gentoo-user] ") = 66 chars.
>
> And if you care about most console mail readers, take mutt for
> example, the default install definitely does not use more than half of
> the 80 chars screen width for displaying the subject line. So now you
> are down to 40 - 14 = 26.
>
> Oh wait, your question may incite a big discussion with 6 levels of
> replies:
>
> 26 - 6 * strlen("Re: ") = 2.
>
> Ah! I see why someone changed the subject of this thread to just "OK".
>
> ;-)

Apologies, I was being facetious (I corrected the Subject field back to the 
original on this reply).  There is indeed a need to write meaningful Subject 
lines and keep them as short as possible.  However, the 80 characters that 
Alan suggested may be appropriate for the body of the message, but not for 
the Subject line which is  invariably shorter.

I think that as long as common sense prevails we should be able to nail this 
one to most participants satisfaction.

PS. On the other hand one would think that common sense ought to also help to 
avoid top posting and html messages </sigh>
-- 
Regards,
Mick

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