[comp.emacs] separator for .signature?

rsm@math.arizona.edu (Robert S. Maier) (12/01/90)

It's traditional in some quarters, when sending a E-mail message or
posting a news article, to precede the signature (especially if
included from a .signature file) by the string

	"-- \n"

i.e. two hyphens, a space, and a newline.  The standard mail and news
posting packages for gnuemacs, for example, do this.  So does rn.

I recall hearing that this was originally for the benefit of some
early Unix mail-reading programs, which displayed the signature only
if requested (and in the days of 300 baud dialups, that wasn't very
often).  Can someone verify this, and/or supply more details?

If the story is true, is there any mail- or news-reading software
still out there that has this feature?  If not, is there any point in
maintaining the old signature separator, or should it be considered
obsolete?


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nazgul@alphalpha.com (Kee Hinckley) (12/02/90)

In article <RSM.90Nov30170514@coral.math.arizona.edu> rsm@math.arizona.edu (Robert S. Maier) writes:
>It's traditional in some quarters, when sending a E-mail message or
>posting a news article, to precede the signature (especially if
>included from a .signature file) by the string
>
>	"-- \n"
>
If you skip the space that's an enclosure-part separator (which would
be used by some programs that no how to de-digestify digests).

>If the story is true, is there any mail- or news-reading software
>still out there that has this feature?  If not, is there any point in
>maintaining the old signature separator, or should it be considered
>obsolete?
If it's a valid separator for a new enclosure then the mail app
we're writing will treat your .sig as separate from the rest of
the message.

						-kee
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I'm not sure which upsets me more; that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.