On Sat, Jan 30, 2021 at 07:40:17PM +0100, Thomas Hochstein wrote:
"Stephen J. Turnbull" wrote:
Why did we do that?
Because it makes sense. The message footer is identical to a signature in every respect:
Ah, no. It is not.
[..] It doesn't matter if such a footer or signature is added by the poster, by the mail client or server (for example in a corporate setting) or by a mailing list manager.
Actually yes, it does.
Here are some use-cases that depend on being able to distinguish between a signature added by the sender, and a footer added by a mailing list.
A recipient may wish, in the mail-reading interface of their MUA, to hide mailing list footers (once you've seen one, you've seen them all, at least for any given ML), while still displaying user signatures (which can be diverse and interesting).
A milter designed to *selectively* strip or otherwise process signatures, ML footers, or both.
Email corpus researchers wishing to selectively analyse signatures or ML footers.
It's not obvious to me that that was a good idea. Maybe it's better to distinguish the list's "signature" from a poster's signature by using a different separator.
Why?
Because they are not the same thing.
Sam
-- A: When it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: When is top-posting a bad thing?
() ASCII ribbon campaign. Please avoid HTML emails & proprietary /\ file formats. (Why? See e.g. https://v.gd/jrmGbS ). Thank you.