E-Mail-Signatures
 

From yesterdays' release notes:


[QUOTE]The Mail integration now ignores anything after a '--' on a line of its own, assuming this is a signature.[/QUOTE]

Could it be there's a space missing after the "--"?

From rfc 3676, regarding signatures in E-Mails and Usenet postings ([url]http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3676.txt ):[/url]

[QUOTE]4.3. Usenet Signature Convention

There is a long-standing convention in Usenet news which also
commonly appears in Internet mail of using "-- " as the separator
line between the body and the signature of a message.
[/QUOTE]

Also, it should only ignore everything after *the* *last* occurrence of "-- " as some users use "--" as bullet points for indented lists.

Tim

I'm not sure I follow...

We don't require a space after the "--", though this was through ignorance of the statement in the RFC. Requiring users to type a hidden space there would just confuse them.

Could you give an example of a mail message where you think we'd trim off too much text by doing the first lone "--"? I considered doing this, but the only case I could think it would come up was some yahoo using a signature like:

--
Hi there!
--

In which case I *do* want to eat everything after the first "--" on a line by itself.

[QUOTE=Tim Wood;27892]I'm not sure I follow...

We don't require a space after the "--", though this was through ignorance of the statement in the RFC. Requiring users to type a hidden space there would just confuse them.[/QUOTE]

Usually, not obeying to standards leads to even more trouble :-)

[QUOTE]
Could you give an example of a mail message where you think we'd trim off too much text by doing the first lone "--"?[/QUOTE]

I frequently format unordered lists like this one (showing the structure of a simple website):

- Home
- Products
-- Product 1
-- Product 2
-- Product 3
- About us
- Contact

Tim

I wondered about this too, understanding the convention to be newline-dash-dash-space with an optional LF. If you want to strip sigs based on a convention then it would seem sensible to either stick to the actual one. My only caveat is that many people use a spaced double dash in plain text to stand for a spaced en- or em-dash, so these would need to be considered.

OTOH, few people know to bother to properly prefix their sig, so it may all be wasted effort.

Hi Tim,

[QUOTE=tkaufmann;27872]Could it be there's a space missing after the "--"?

From rfc 3676, regarding signatures in E-Mails and Usenet postings ([url]http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3676.txt ):[/url]



Also, it should only ignore everything after *the* *last* occurrence of "-- " as some users use "--" as bullet points for indented lists.

Tim[/QUOTE]

I agree with the RFC comment, but the second part … OmniFocus only truncates mails after lines which ONLY contain --, i. e. no bulleted lists. So the second bit isn’t really an issue.

Regarding the RFC thing, well, the only people I receive mail from with proper --[space] separator are Linux geeks. E. g. Outlook Express automatically removes that last space even if you’ve entered it. And as -- (without a space) also reacts on “proper” signature separators, I don’t really see this as a huge problem. Perhaps it’s even a boon as those funky OE sig separators get truncated, too.

Cheers,
-Sascha

[QUOTE=nggalai;28045]
I agree with the RFC comment, but the second part … OmniFocus only truncates mails after lines which ONLY contain --, i. e. no bulleted lists. So the second bit isn’t really an issue.
[/QUOTE]

Ah, ok!

[QUOTE]
Regarding the RFC thing, well, the only people I receive mail from with proper --[space] separator are Linux geeks. E. g. Outlook Express automatically removes that last space even if you’ve entered it.[/QUOTE]

Outlook Express is both outdated and has never been regarded a proper email client.

Following your argument that only Linux geeks use the space separator, why have that feature at all? Some use "--", others "-- " and there's also "**************", "_____________", no separator at all, interfering email clients etc. So either stick with the only standard we have, forget about the feature at all or come up with some fancy algorithm which properly identifies signatures. I think though that the latter would be Mail.app's job, not OF's.

Tim

Good morning, Tim,
[QUOTE=tkaufmann;28159]

Following your argument that only Linux geeks use the space separator, why have that feature at all? Some use "--", others "-- " and there's also "**************", "_____________", no separator at all, interfering email clients etc. So either stick with the only standard we have, forget about the feature at all or come up with some fancy algorithm which properly identifies signatures. I think though that the latter would be Mail.app's job, not OF's. [/QUOTE]

Na, that wasn’t an argument, just an illustration (the Linux geek thing). ;) I work mostly with publishers and media companies, and they don’t use any sig divider at all – mostly HTML attachments as sigs or something like your ************ thingy.

I am all for complying to standards, but in this case, OF captures both correct and incorrect signature dividers, so it’s okay, I think.

Though: I personally don’t care too much for this feature in OF and would prefer to be able to turn it off. Many first-contacts I’ve had to date state something on the lines of “contact info is in the sig” and it would be quite … unwelcome for me to have the most relevant bit of information truncated by the OF clipping.

Cheers,
-Sascha

[QUOTE=nggalai;28210]Though: I personally don’t care too much for this feature in OF and would prefer to be able to turn it off. Many first-contacts I’ve had to date state something on the lines of “contact info is in the sig” and it would be quite … unwelcome for me to have the most relevant bit of information truncated by the OF clipping.[/QUOTE]

OmniFocus doesn't ignore signatures in clippings, it only ignores them in mail messages from yourself which are automatically processed into new actions (via OmniFocus Mail Preferences).

[QUOTE=Ken Case;28221]OmniFocus doesn't ignore signatures in clippings, it only ignores them in mail messages from yourself which are automatically processed into new actions (via OmniFocus Mail Preferences).[/QUOTE]

Ah! Excellent! Thanks a lot, Ken! :) I apparently totally misunderstood the issue here. :D

In that case, I would also vote for RFC compliance. After all, you should be able to properly set up your own signatures if it’s any important to you and we shouldn’t propagate bad sig dividers.

Cheers,
-Sascha

Even such a long discussion about - literally - nothing helps making OF a bit better, I suppose ;-)

Tim