Preventing multiple signatures in email conversation?

[Kevin Miller]

Julian Field wrote:
> On 27/04/2009 17:42, Chris Barber wrote:
>> Is there a way to get MailScanner to not put multiple signatures?
>> Like detect that there is already one on the message and not append
>> subsequent signatures? I would rather not rely on the email clients
>> to do this... 
>> 
> I think this has already been mentioned in this thread. But...
> With an HTML signature, it's easy as you can insert some hidden text
> in the sig that doesn't appear in the viewed result, and use that as
> an identifier to say "Here is the sig, don't add another one".  
> But in a plain text message, it's a lot harder as there is no way of
> putting in hidden text, and once the message has been badly quoted by
> some mail client when the reply was done, you can't reliably
> automatically find the original signature in it.   
> When you're passing through multiple MailScanner servers in the same
> organisation, you can do it with a header. But you can't trust the
> contents of any header once you've been outside your organisation, as
> many environments throw away most headers, particularly when the
> message has been replied to.    
> 
> In the cases of multiple MailScanner servers, and HTML signatures, I
> can and already have solved the problem. There just isn't a neat way
> of doing it for plain text signatures, sorry.  
> 
> If you have any stunning ideas, then let me know :-)

Way back in the old DOS days, I used to use ASCI character 255 as an invisible character now and then.  Can't remember what for, but for some reason I needed a non-space white character.  It was easy to generate - hold down the Alt key and press 255 on the keypad.  It was invisible, but benign.  Perhaps sticking char(255) in the text sig would be a possiblity?

...Kevin
-- 
Kevin Miller                Registered Linux User No: 307357
CBJ MIS Dept.               Network Systems Admin., Mail Admin.
155 South Seward Street     ph: (907) 586-0242
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