On 1/25/22 3:48 PM, Phil Smith III wrote:
There is an old standard that a line comprising:
hyphen hyphen space linend
I was pondering replying, but since CarlosM asked, I will. (Here b/c I
have comments for the second half of Phil's statement.)
My understanding is that the dash dash space is a /convention/ and is
not actually defined anywhere. At least that was my takeaway about this
very thing from another conversation elsewhere within the last month.
-- I'd be happy to learn that there is more to this.
means "start of signature" and well-behaved MUAs clip starting there
on reply. Outlook doesn't support this
I believe that I have seen or gotten Outlook to support this in the
(distant) past. However, there is one REALLY BIG CAVEAT to this which
impacts Outlook and many other MUAs.
The dash dash space is a convention for ASCII *text* email. When you
introduce HTML (or even RTF), this convention goes out the window.
The convention goes out the window because the dash dash space is inside
of the HTML body of the message, thus probably harder to recognize
programmatically. (Sure, it could be done, but that would imply that
someone who cares actually wanted it done.)
(makes sense, since it uses top-posting, which I maintain makes sense
in a corporate environment, though like many, I prefer bottom-posting
for many conversations),
I maintain that humans (or any other species that I'm aware of) do not
provide the answer before the hear the question. So ...
chronologically, it makes most sense to have the question and then the
reply. Given that English (the language this thread is currently using)
is chronologically old on top, new on bottom.
I think the real reason for the proliferation ~> infestation of top
posting is that many MUAs don't (or won't) tackle the pruning issue, as
such they take the easy way out and simply prepend it to the message.
Now, with more and more MUAs hiding the quoted content, people aren't
even aware that it's there. So a long thread on something like Gmail
ends up with many Many MANY copies of the entire thread back to the
first message a la:
reply to the reply to the reply to the message
> reply to the reply to the message
>
>> reply to the message
>>
>>> message
ad nauseam
but LISTSERV might. I have not experimented, and it probably doesn't
matter these days anyway.
I'd be pleasantly surprised if if LISTSERV -- or any other mailing list
manager -- knew how to identify (unnecessary) signature / footers, much
less actually configured to do it.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
