On Fri, 24 Jul 2020 19:03:13 -0700
Rick Moen <rick@???> wrote:

> flush-left two hyhens plus a single space character, and
> then immediate a hard return

Oh, I didn't know about the single space.

Thanks for that, and the rest. Getting lore and detail is a challenge
for me for the older stuff, because there's just so much opinion to
wade through on the contemporary internet.


> Of course, if you're using, say, the internal IMAP4 support of Claw
> Mail, then you aren't using a separate MDA, and cannot leverage an
> MDA's filtering functions.

This is my case. There is a filtering feature that can have a trigger
made to execute an external program. It might be an interesting
exercise for me to make something now that I know more.

It also might be interesting for me to create a list of the non-standard
signatures (by their separator, or by the whole block of text) to be
treated the same way, allowing me to set aside the signature of known
regulars.

I've also still got lists of hand-collected taglines from my youth, and
I wonder if I can figure out how to insert random entries.


> McQ! (4x80)

Now I understand this. :)

As an aside, the RFC suggests a limit of 75, even for a signature, since
this leaves space for quoting.




----

Some research notes for others.


Standard for interchange of USENET messages:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc1036/

"Son of 1036":

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc1849/

There's a lot of interesting stuff, but page 22 has:

... If a poster or posting agent does append
a signature to an article, the signature SHOULD be preceded with a
delimiter line containing (only) two hyphens (ASCII 45) followed by
one blank (ASCII 32). Posting agents SHOULD limit the length of
signatures, since verbose excess bordering on abuse is common if no
restraint is imposed; 4 lines is a common limit.

also, on page 23:

      NOTE: Four 75-column lines of signature text is 300 characters,
      which is ample to convey name and mail-address information in all
      but the most bizarre situations.