Incoming musing..


I haven't investigated the solution for email, but I would assume that
many email clients can filter out signatures.

However, when I went looking through my email client (Claws Mail [1]) I
couldn't find anything obvious! Maybe I didn't look hard enough.

  - Perhaps I could find (or make) a plugin to show/hide (by default)
    signatures based on content after various symbols (like dashes).

Bad ideas:

  - Script a solution to just remove content, summoned by a hotkey.  I
    do this to let me raw-edit emails with control-e (so I can add
    notes in them)
  - Have a pre-processor on each email as it's received.

These are bad ideas because they're destructive modifications. Backups
are possible, but then you'd have to somehow know if destroyed content
is actually valuable to view. Maybe the backups could be inserted as
attachments to each email that was thought to have a signature.

It would be awesome if that was implemented at the mailing list server
(mailman) level as a configuration option. I checked, and at least
for this list it doesn't exist. I'd argue that signatures are common
enough to justify implementing this complexity.

Signatures are a very old notion. They are trivially hidden on most
forums because a signature is implemented as a separate text field. In
old offline mail readers [2] (like Blue Wave [3] as I recall) it was
possible to hide such things.. but the idea might not have survived.



--

(this text is actually an example of a signature)

[1] Claws Mail
https://www.claws-mail.org/
my notes: https://blog.spiralofhope.com/?p=4509

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offline_reader

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Wave_(mail_reader)
my notes (minor): https://blog.spiralofhope.com/?p=24393