121424 - Signature should be interpreted from last line to delimiter

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(MailNews Core :: MIME, enhancement)

Description

[Holger Metzger]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:0.9.7+)
Gecko/20020122
BuildID:    2002012203

Right now, Mozilla interprets the signature by looking for the first "-- " and
interprets all following text as signature.
I think it would be better if Mozilla would check from the last line of a
message up to the first "-- " it encounters.
This way it is ensured, that a random "-- " within the text is not interpreted
as the signature delimeter.

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

this is front end.

Comment 2

[Erik Hensema]

Would be a nice enhancement.

Setting platform/os to all.

Comment 3

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

I happen to think that the current behaviour is better. I think the spec
suggests that the current behaviour is even more correct, but you could probably
argue about that. In any case, what if I have a signature myself and the mailing
list software adds another? Then, both should count as signature.

> This way it is ensured, that a random "-- " within the text is not interpreted
> as the signature delimeter.

Have you ever encountered random "-- " in the body? I don't remember ever seeing
that.


Apart from that, given the way libmime works, this RFE would be extremely hard
to implement (if possible at all).
BTW: It's libmime, not front end.

I vote for WONTFIX. Confirming nevertheless, because it's a valid suggestion.

Comment 4

[Holger Metzger]

Some newsreaders (MT-Newswatcher on MacOS for example) look for the signature
separator from bottom to "-- ".
A random "-- " could happen (especially with format=flowed readers where a "--"
would turn into "-- "). Maybe someone uses it for a list for separating text.
Also, many Web-based mailer add a signature to any outgoing message, and if a
user also adds a signature, then Mozilla interprets only the first "-- " as
signature.

OK, I have to admit, it's not very likely, but hey, you never know. :-)

Comment 5

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

> (especially with format=flowed readers where a "--" would turn into "-- ").

No, the f=f standard knows special guards against that, IIRC.

> Also, many Web-based mailer add a signature to any outgoing message, and if a
> user also adds a signature, then Mozilla interprets only the first "-- " as
> signature.

huh? that's exactly the same case as with the mailing lists, no? If the user has
a sig and the webmail app adds another at the end, then *both* are sigs. This
current code would recognize both as one sig. Your proposed changes would not
recognize the user sig as sig anymore. This is exactly the case why I think that
the current solution is better than the suggested one.

Comment 6

[Alex Robinson]

I supmitted bug 178011 before doing the correct search to find this bug.

A common way to reproduce the problem is to subscribe to a mail list digest. The
digest will include a number of emails, some of which will contain sigs starting
with "--". When you reply to such a digest, the digest is not completely quoted.
It's truncated at the first "--" sig.

I've had good luck with bottom up processing in certain mail handling systems
whose job it is (among other things) to remove sigs.

Comment 7

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Alex, it works in the case of viewing, not? Only the sigs are dimmed, not the
rest of the digest, right? This works because Mozilla knows how to process these
digests, and it shows that the method itself is not broken. If Reply behaves
differently, that's a reply-specific bug. The sig detection method is the same
in both cases.

WONTFIXing.