Preventing multiple signatures in email conversation?

[Rick Cooper]

----Original Message----
From: mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info
[mailto:mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info] On Behalf Of Kevin
Miller Sent: Monday, April 27, 2009 1:20 PM To: 'MailScanner discussion'
Subject: RE: Preventing multiple signatures in email conversation?

> 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?     
> 

[...]

I will bet you did it for the same reason as I did, if a directory or
filename began with a char(255) it did not appear in directory listings so
it was a way to create items that were completely unaccessable (even from
delete commands) unless you knew the file/dir name was alt+255FileName

Rick


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