There is a surprising amount of people, who can write pagelong emails without once mentioning the subject by name, so searching for it involves a thesaurus, a lot of csi-esque "thinking like the perpetrator thought" and luck. You simply cannot open a new folder for every thematic aberration - so it would be wonderful if you could, in another color and font, add to the subject of the email a few words that sum it up and make it refindable. of course, a lot would be marked bs, not for refindability but for forgettability, so the edited header should not be included when a reply to the message is sent... I've personally only used a few email-programs, so maybe there is one out there that allows it, in that case hand just over the deletion marks :-)
-- loonquawl, Jul 12 2007

Outlook (non-express) supports it directly. http://lifehacker.c...archable-148166.php
[jutta, Jul 12 2007]

Might be better to add an x-subject: header. Probably not a good idea to change the sender's choice of subject.
-- Galbinus_Caeli, Jul 12 2007


mmm - edible email subjects
-- hippo, Jul 12 2007


[hippo] you beat me to it!

Don't some word-processing programs have "Summarise" as a functional option that will (supposedly) cut through the crap and highlight the pertinent parts of a given message?
-- zen_tom, Jul 12 2007


[zen_tom]"summarize" doesn't quite cut it, as the truly important words never show up - you'd need a sentient (and possibly psychic) computer for the kind of tagging i had in mind

[jutta] argl! the minute i ditched outlook for general unsaviourishness this pops up - it is principally what i wanted, minus the "other color/font for distinguishability and forget it for replies"-feature
-- loonquawl, Jul 12 2007


I figure what you'd really want is tagging, actually. Leave the subject as is, and just associate arbitary keywords with your messages.
-- jutta, Jul 12 2007


Damn, thought it said edible email subjects, Id bun that.

=edit= should have read the annos before annoying
-- evilpenguin, Jul 12 2007


I alter the subjects of received emails in Outlook constantly.

I'm surprised other email platforms don't allow this; I guess you could forward the email to yourself with a new subject.
-- phundug, Jul 12 2007


// general unsaviourishness [marked-for-tagline]
-- TheLightsAreOnBut, Jul 12 2007


gmail has this feature and if it doesnt hepl then u have a handy search butto where i can search via conten itnstanltly as the google servers do the looking for u
-- IceFest, Jul 12 2007


// gmail has this feature and if it doesnt hepl then u have a handy search butto where i can search via conten itnstanltly as the google servers do the looking for u//
You can tag your incoming and outgoing messages in Gmail with a meaningful theme or subject.
At a later date you can filter on this subject.
Additionally (although this has been broached in the idea text) you can search for keywords in the message body (as can many other mail services)
-- gnomethang, Jul 12 2007


Personally, I consider the subject line to be a humanity test and filter accordingly.

Explains nothing about me, I realise, other than the sometimes inordinately long time you may wait to ever hear back from me.
-- reensure, Jul 13 2007



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