When you reply a mail, you will find that most if not all mailclient put "Re:" before the subject. Some brainded mailclients even did this when it was already a "Re:" resulting in subjects like "Re: Re: Re: subject".

I sometimes get mail from even more braindead mailclients and server that are kind of localized and put "ANTW" ("antword", german for answer, read "reply") in the subject. Which will result in nice headers like "Re: Antw: Re: subject".

The most stupid thing is not that some mailclients are braindead and dont use internet standard. Thats only part of the problem, you can hardly call correct quoting a standard if the most used mail program (and hence users) dont get it anymore.

The most stupid thing is that the developers of the mailclients dont know what the "Re:" in the subject line means. It doesnt mean "Reply"!

See about.com:

"Re" is an abbreviated form of the Latin "in re", which, "re" being the ablative case of "res" (thing), means "concerning" or "in the matter of"

See also webster. So all you braindead localized mail developers, stop replying and start building something that is useful! Now comment on this with a funny subject line

Recently I chatted with an unnamed friend on how to prevent spam. Since this site has a rather high pageranking, it gets into spammed a lot. During such a spamstorm, the load of this poor Pentium 166 goes through the roof. Ever type "w" on a Unix system just to see "80" after 5 minutes?

While none of the spam postings get published, the losers still try to dump their referrer spam, trackback spam and most of all comment spam. With web 2.0 (whatever that is) the landscape of (anti) spam tools will change as well. Where the "Web 1.0" used to be a read web, now it has become a read/write web. Where "write" isn’t per se defined as text. And there is where its gets complicated.

Comment spam can be prevented. In Drupal (the CMS underneath this site) you can use (graphical) captcha’s, blacklisting, moderation and dozen of other tools to prevent the spammers from getting thru and even block them before they post. But the "write" part of Web 2.0 doesn’t have to be restricted to "comments" or "postings". Since user can upload and share just about anything, we will see an increase in other spam postings, porn video’s, Viagra audio’s or Rolex pictures. Every knife has two sides; it can be used for the good and the bad. And with the good "user generated content" bad "spambot generated content" is bound to happen.

Spam comments can relative easy be recognized, for example by services like askimet. It gets more complicated with non text content. How do you fingerprint an audio posting and recognize it as off topic / spam? Spammer can easy make zillion variations of a picture with some text in it, dumping an URL in a random place, randomly curved and with a random font. How do you tag this as spam? E-mail spam has increased a lot the last half year with this kind of graphical text spam messages obfuscated with random lines around it and this kind of spam has been very successful getting thru to the "inbox" of most users.

This brings us to a new field; call it reverse captcha’s or something. Computers recognizing computer generated images with spam text/ URL’s. And the audio field is even completely blank, a greenfield where much work will have to be done to make Web 2.0 a success.

The first companies starting to work on recognizing copyrighted video material are already booming. But that is just the "holywood" part getting in, the low hanging fruit of the scared copyrightholders. A lot more work has to be done before we can differentiate people and hence users generated content from bots hence bot generated content.

I think the ultimate Turing test will be to be able to differentiate a real blog posting from a sponsored blog posting. But maybe that is beyond the power of a computer since even people find it hard to tell the difference. Sure, we can see that the new Bond lives in a Sony dominated world, but can you see the difference between the previous posting on this site -which was not sponsored- and this posting on this site which was brought to you by the friendly people of Drupal Inc?

Many people have said that "email is a place where knowledge goes to die"

It is not! Email is the place where knowledge becomes information. It is up to the client (both the person and the software) to retrieve this information and make it into knowledge again. ESB's, CMS-es, Mac's spotlight, GMail and even Vista can help to make place this information in to a semantic rich environment and make it more powerful to use this information.

Gmail adds new features. Now with a small drop down button that is rather nifty and handy IMHO.

Sure. Web2.0 and perpetual beta are 90% meaningless hype words, but fact is that microsoft comes with a new outlook every 3 years, hosted ASP / webbased mail can have a new version every day.