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AFW - Signature - Sigdashes

The "signature dashes" are not only two dashes, but actually it is a line which is used to indicate the start of signature. This allows an easy recognition of the *start* of a signature in a message.

Sigdashes are defined by the "son-of-rfc1036" like this:
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).

let me clarify this again:

This line consists of two dashes and a trailing space, ie "-- " (note the space) and thus can be recognized in a data stream as the character sequence "(newline)(dash)(dash)(space)(newline)". Some programs recognize a signature by the (sigdashes).

There are no additional characters before, after or in between. This means no whitespace before the dashes, no additional dashes, excatly one space at the end, followed only by a newline which ends the line.

dash-dash-space - it's exactly that! no more, no less. As someone said: "Feel free to disagree all you want." ;-)


Sigdashes and their Application

Many clients already make use of sigdashes - both for colorization and removal on replies:

Some programs enforce the use of sigdashes, the mailer eg MUTT and the newsreader SLRN.

Take a look at these picture pages to see examples of sigdashes in use:

SLRN Picture page: http://www.math.fu-berlin.de/~guckes/slrn/pics.html

Hopefully, one day all programs showing mails and articles will be able suppress signatures if you don't want to see them.

So please give others the chance to make use of this feature, too. Use sigdashes whenever appending your sig to email or articles! Thanks!


Sven Guckes <afw@guckes.net>
www.guckes.net/afw/
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