Re: Speaking of the Great Subject War?

[David Curry <david.curry () NEWSCHOOL EDU>]

Well, the regular expression for this particular mess isn't _that_ hard:

s/^Re: *\(\[[^]]*\]\).*\] *\(.*\)/Re: \1 \2/


Just sayin'. :-)

But seriously, everything Valdis says is true. Writing something general
enough to fix all possible broken subject lines is really hard. A better
answer might be to fix the software that's breaking them in the first place.

--

DAVID A. CURRY, CISSP
*DIRECTOR • INFORMATION SECURITY & PRIVACY*
THE NEW SCHOOL • INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

71 FIFTH AVE., 9TH FL., NEW YORK, NY 10003
+1 646 909-4728 • david.curry () newschool edu


On Thu, Aug 15, 2019 at 11:41 AM Valdis Klētnieks <valdis.kletnieks () vt edu>
wrote:

> On Thu, 15 Aug 2019 02:32:09 -0000, Scott Norton said:
> > Has anyone come across vendors that are starting to provide tooling or
> > functionality to start stripping the proliferation of warnings and such
> from
> > subjects?
>
> On a technical level, If you want to collapse a set of run-away Re:
> headers,
> all that's needed is the ability to do textual substitution.  The devil is
> in
> the details, as a simple regular expression isn't good enough...
>
> The problem is that the regular expression gets very ugly very fast.  You
> would
> *think* that a simple s/Re: (.*) Re: \1/Re: \1/ would work, but noooo..
> Let's
> look at the Re:'s in the subject line causing the kerfluffle, in order:
>
> Re: [SECURITY] [Ext]
> Re: [SECURITY] [EXTERNAL]
> Re: [SECURITY]  [EXTERNAL]
> Re: [SECURITY] [External] [SECURITY] Duo
>
> We've got 4 different 'external' tags - spelled out/abbreviated,
> upper/lower
> case, and with a different number of blanks. And *of course*, they ended
> up in
> the almost worst possible order for a regexp - only way to make it worse
> is if
> '[Ext]' was on one of the middle ones, or if people had been more
> inconsistent
> in whether they put 'external' in front of or behind 'security'...
>
> To quote Jamie Zawinski:  "Some people, when confronted with a problem,
> think
> "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems".  This
> isn't a
> problem that can be solved at the regular expression level - more
> understanding
> is needed than just textual matching.
>
> Heck, 'Re: Fwd: Re: Fwd: Re: Re:' still happens. This must be harder than
> it looks :)
>
> > 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.
>
> Well, that simplifies things somewhat- if you know you added something, you
> know the format of what you added and can strip it out more easily.
> However -
> if you are in the habit of adding [EXTERNAL], you have two problems:  1)
> Do you
> add it if the Subject: already contains it? 2) Do you remove it on
> outbound if
> it arrived with one already and it isn't one you added?
>
> > 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]”.
>
> In general, not really a solvable problem.  Consider that the next text
> after this
> paragraph was the Educause footer:
>
> > Replies to EDUCAUSE Community Group emails are sent to the entire
> community
> > list. If you want to reply only to the person who sent the message, copy
> and
> > paste their email address and forward the email reply.
>
> Yeah.  Copy/Paste. People want to forward something hard enough, they'll
> find a way.
>
> There's also a deeper problem here.  If the information is sensitive
> enough that
> forwarding it could be a problem, *why is it not encrypted so only the
> recipient
> can read it*, and thus *has* to resort to the copy/paste method to pass it
> on?
>
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