Thomas Hochstein writes:
"Stephen J. Turnbull" wrote:
Because [reusing the .sig separator for the footer] makes sense.
I understand that they are syntactically identical.
The message footer is identical to a signature in every respect:
Not true. The mail standards are very careful to distinguish between *originator* elements, such as Reply-To, and those that may be used by third parties, such as Received and List-Id. This could go either way.
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 the semantics are different. One is for use by the author, the other for use by the list. I would not want .signatures stripped or suppressed because they are often interesting or amusing, but do want most footers suppressed (and would rarely care if they were stripped) because my MUA knows how to get list information (such as archives) out of the message header.
I'm not suggesting that my peculiarities are a good reason to override the sense of most users. It's an example of how the semantics are different, and might usefully be given different syntax.
Steve