From: Paul Haldane (Paul.Haldane@newcastle.ac.uk)
Date: Wed Nov 03 1999 - 08:32:17 CST
On Wed, 3 Nov 1999 jose.kahan@w3.org wrote:
...
> - Is it an RFC convention or not to separate signatures with "--\n" (
> or "---\n", etc).
I could have sworn that this was discussed on this list recently but I've
been through the archives and my mail folders and don't see anything.
My understanding is that the 'standard' separator is "\n-- \n" (note
trailing space after the double dash).
This isn't covered in any current rfc but is in the
News Article Format internet draft
http://search.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-usefor-article-02.txt
and in Henry Spencer's 'Son of rfc1036' document
ftp://zoo.toronto.edu/pub/news.txt.Z
(the internet draft mentioned above is a successor to this).
These two documents _are_ descrining Usenet/news standards/conventions
but it seems likely (to me) that the same convention will appear in the
MESSFOR internet draft.
Here's the relevant text from the USEFOR document...
A "personal signature" is a short closing text automatically
added to the end of articles by posting agents, identifying
the poster and giving his network addresses, etc. If a poster
or posting agent does append such a signature to an article,
it MUST be preceded with a delimiter line containing (only)
two hyphens (ASCII 45) followed by one SP (ASCII 32). The
signature is considered to extend from the last occurrence of
that delimiter up to the end of the article (or up to the end
of the part in the case of a multipart MIME body). Followup
agents, when incorporating quoted text from a precursor,
SHOULD NOT include the signature in the quotation. Posting
agents SHOULD discourage (at least with a warning) signatures
of excessive length (4 lines is a commonly accepted limit).
> - If it is not, would you like to have a setup configuration to avoid
> having this automatic signature rule.
I wouldn't object to there being such an option :->. I don't think I'd
use it myself. At the moment we treat any of
^--\n
^---\n
^----\n
^-- \n
as a signature marker, whilst in we should probably only recognise the
last one (though this would cause problems for users trying to do the
right thing whose mailers strip off trailing spaces at the end of lines -
includes Outlook Express I believe).
Paul
-- Paul Haldane Computing Service University of Newcastle