[The original question was "how to use procmail to automatically remove
people's signatures from incoming e-mail ...]
On Sun, 1 Sep 1996, Peggy Wilkins wrote:
In my opinion, it's better to educate people to edit out unnecessary
text in their replies. They should be cutting out the sigs before
they send their messages, in addition to cutting text that is not
directly relevant to their reply. I am genuinely surprised that
people are not taught to do this.
i certainly agree that it would be far more courteous for people to do
what you describe, but given the difficulty of breaking millions of people
of (what we consider to be) their bad habits, why not try to solve the
problem another way: with procmail?
.o8 .o8
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888oooo. oooo d8b .oooo. ooo. .oo. .oooo888 .ooooo. ooo. .oo.
d88' `88b `888""8P `P )88b `888P"Y88b d88' `888 d88' `88b `888P"Y88b
888 888 888 .oP"888 888 888 888 888 888 888 888 888
888 888 888 d8( 888 888 888 888 888 888 888 888 888
`Y8bod8P' d888b `Y888""8o o888o o888o `Y8bod88P" `Y8bod8P' o888o o888o
brandon d. zylstra
brandon(_at_)umich(_dot_)edu
Brandon,
Your signature is an excellent example of why it would be very difficult
to automatically remove signatures from incoming e-mail. Please define
a "rule" by which a program can determine that your e-mail message ends,
and your signature starts. Please do not make the rule specific to
*your* signature, but make it general, so it can be applied to my
signature, and all of your other correspondant's signatures.
Unless the filter can read english, (and even if it could) I can think
of no heuristic to apply which would allow me to determine what was
signature (which should be removed) and what was "content" (which should
be kept).
If there were a global convention which all users would agree upon, we
could apply a rule to follow the convetion. Such a convention might be
to begin signatures with a blank line, followed by a line of
underscores, then arbitrary text.
However, there is always the case that someone might not be following
the convention and may include a nice table in their file. For example,
a table of salary increments which begins with a blank line, and then a
line of underscores would be thrown away from an incoming e-mail
message.
In case I haven't made my point yet, here is one of the many signatures
I've collected over the years. How can you tell where the e-mail ends
and the signature starts?
" Work is for people who can't play volleyball. "
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_____________________________________________________________________
Alan Stebbens <stebbens(_at_)sgi(_dot_)com> http://reality.sgi.com/stebbens