On 1/30/21 8:23 AM, Sam Kuper wrote: > On Sat, Jan 30, 2021 at 06:19:41AM -0500, Richard Damon wrote: >> On 1/30/21 3:28 AM, Sam Kuper wrote: >>> Sender signature != ML footer. >>> >>> So, as Stephen says, the separators used to indicate those two >>> distinct kinds of text block should be different. >> The one advantage I can see for using the signature separator is that >> many (some?) email programs will automatically trim off the message >> after the separator, so it will automatically remove the list footer >> from a reply to the list. > Ideally, email clients ((MUAs) would have separate user-configurable > options (with sensible defaults) for how to handle signatures and > footers. > > But unless signatures and footers use distinct separators, it would not > be practical for MUA developers to implement separate options for > signature- and footer-handling. So, using distinct separators for > footers compared to signatures still seems to me the right approach. > > Sam > The issue is that the 'footer' separator that was used isn't really a truely distinctive line, just a line with some number of underscore that could easily just happen in a natural body of text. The signature seperator was specifically chosen to be very unlikely to naturally occur, including that single space at the end of the line.
The basic idea where this came from was that in the days with significant bandwidth limits, it was very important to get people in the habit of trimming messages, and the signature delimiter became a standard to allow 'good' tools to automatically eliminate the extra stuff that was added at the end of messages. I sort of doubt that there is enough will to create and support some other 'standard' code to mark a second type of 'message ending' text, and it almost certainly would NOT be the line of underscores that mailman used. -- Richard Damon _______________________________________________ Mailman-Developers mailing list -- mailman-developers@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to mailman-developers-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/mailman-developers.python.org/ Mailman FAQ: https://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: https://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
