Speaking of the Great Subject War…

[Scott Norton <dsnorton () UW EDU>]

Has anyone come across vendors that are starting to provide tooling or functionality to start stripping the 
proliferation of warnings and such from subjects?
It really seems to me as a matter of etiquette institutions should be cleaning up the mess they make before sending 
their users emails back out. I am assuming that the current state is largely a lack of functionality rather than 
rudeness or a desire to ultimately make it into so much noise that the fad will collapse on itself.
Perhaps there are some already being good subject line stewards? If there are tools out there that already do the 
cleanup on the outbound it would be helpful to know so that we can push other vendors to do it as a matter of 
competition.
Although I have not seen any substantive work to persuade me of the efficacy of the whole “[external]” thing when in 
sustained use, I do have need to trigger IRM based on a user input such as “[Do Not Forward]”.  The subject line is 
really the most universal thing to do that in, but I do not want to contribute to this whole subject line mess.   I 
would also like to be able to strip potentially erroneous instances of things like “[Internal]” or “[Verified]” that 
have the potential of tricking people before they have their morning coffee.
So, if there are folks that have implemented or are implementing subject cleanup, I would really like to hear more?


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