Preventing multple signatures in email conversation?

[Julian Field]

On 25/04/2009 16:56, Drew Marshall wrote:
> You are right in so much as MS is doing what it's told, so it's not 
> it's fault but it would be cool if old signatures could be removed. 
> Here in the UK companies are legally bound to use such things so 
> simply not having them is not possible. I wonder if it would be 
> possible to use the _SIGNATURE_ special word to perhaps add some form 
> of unique additional identifier to a signature so when it sees it next 
> time, it is removed. A little like the watermark but actually in the 
> signature in some way.
There is
Allow Multiple HTML Signatures = no
which uses a marker in the HTML Signature to know not to add the 
signature again, but with text signatures there is no way of inserting 
"hidden text" in any way so that we would know not to add the signature 
again.
There is also
Dont Sign HTML If Headers Exist = # In-Reply-To: References:
so it detects when not to add the HTML signature. Unfortunately I can't 
tell if the text signature has already been added, without searching the 
entire message for signs of the signature, which would be really slow 
and unreliable as a correspondent's email app may have re-wrapped the 
text in the message, so you can't just search for matching lines. It 
would be very slow with multi-line sigs especially.

So that's not really practical.

If you have any great ideas that might help solve this problem, then 
give me a shout. It is easy for HTML signatures as you can look for 
signs of the previous copy of the sig, but you can't do that as simply 
with text messages.

Jules

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