Ill-considered complaints [was: RE: early networking (was Re: G4 cube (was Re: 68K Macs with MacOS 7.5 still in production use...))]

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

> Actually, Mr. Cook, the standard for the last 35 years or so has been to
> change the subject line, with the old subject in SQUARE BRACKETS with the
> characters "was: " prepended.

Not the standard, but a convention.

The standard is documented in RFC 5322 section 3.6.4 (and dates back to 
RFC822).  This isn't anything new.  In the Usenet world, nn and trn made 
agressive use of these headers to thread discussion chains.  Any good MUA 
will use them as well.  Note that in the email world, 'popular' and 'good' 
are mostly disjoint sets :-(

--lyndon