Preventing multple signatures in email conversation?

[Kai Schaetzl]

Julian Field wrote on Sat, 25 Apr 2009 17:17:42 +0100:

> 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.

I don't think this applies here, HTML or not. As I understand the point is 
that sending a message back and forth between two correspondents four times 
you may have 8 signatures in the end, most of them somewhere in the quoted 
text. He wants to have these signatures removed if I understand correctly.

The options you mention can help with accidental double-adding of a 
signature by MailScanner (not sure in which scenario that could happen, 
maybe if you have more than one gateway server and all of them could be 
used), but not if a signature is already present somewhere deep in the 
mail, right?

One possible way with text signatures might be to remove all lines that 
start with a signature marker and the next lines until it reaches a blank 
line or exceeds four lines. Might FP sometimes. But for that you have to 
scan the message completely. As I understand you wanted to avoid this.

Kai

-- 
Kai Schätzl, Berlin, Germany
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