415655 - i18n of "Re:" when replying

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 213004

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, enhancement)

Description

[Dan Wolff]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071204 Ubuntu/7.10 (gutsy) Firefox/2.0.0.11
Build Identifier: 2.0.0.6

I only have experience of Swedish mails, and thus I don't know whether it's a problem in other languages.

Many Swedish mail programs/web mail apps use "Sv:" or "SV:" (short for 'svar', reply in English) instead of "Re:" when replying, which after several replies results in a subject line like "Re: Sv: Re: Sv: Re: Original subject".

Since most mail programs are English based "Re:" is still the most common, and it would be good if all used the same system, so the solution would be to:
* internationalize the current "Re:" to allow several values
* still use "Re:" as default

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Reply_indicators - you can add a pref to not add Re: when you reply to a Sv: subject if it's a particular problem for you, but as bug 213004 said while adding that pref, the mail clients (primarily Outlook and Outlook Express) using a localized Re: are doing the wrong thing, and shipping with that pref set by default for all possible Sv:/AW:/whatever localized versions would just encourage them to continue doing the wrong thing (and, as it fails to say, would then mess up my replies talking about where to go for drinks after work, and someone else's American Whitewater meeting subject).

If we were being Anglocentric (well, Latincentric, since Re: is only native for the non-existent native Latin speakers), and localized versions of Re: worked well in general, in other clients, then maybe we would need to reconsider, but if you google for things like "AW Antwort" you see thousands of mailing list archives with subjects like "AW: Antwort: AW: Antwort: Something". (Sv seems to be doing a bit better - "Sv Svar" only gets a few, and the second result is "How to fix the broken Outlook reply behaviour," though there are a fair number of "SV: SV: SV: SV:" subjects). RFC 2822 says to use no more than one instance of exactly "Re:" for a reason, and this is it.

Comment 2

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

You might also be interested in bug 319037, which I think is something we should do. 

Webmails are a big(er even) offender with those too.