280563 - Signature cannot contain signature...

Status: VERIFIED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Daniel Glazman (:glazou) (not active in Mozilla any more)]

I suggest to change the way a signature file is attached to a new message: I
just tried to use the following signature with an email account (indentation
just for readability):

   </Daniel>
   --
   Disruptive Innovations, the people behind Nvu

And that's very painful since Thunderbird always adds a leading "--\n" before my
signature </Daniel>...
So I suggest to check if there is already a line made only of "-", "=" or "_" in
the attached signature and not include the leading "--\n" if the answer is true.

I originally thought of a checkbox but that's too geeky. The kind of things we
could see in MozAppSuite and that should not be in Thunderbird IMHO...

Still, what Thunderbird offers to attach right now is _not_ a real signature.
It's a .signature (dot signature) with a big unix background.

Comment 1

[Scott MacGregor]

Sorry Daniel but --\n is the universal character string that precede a
signature. That's what all the mail clients out there on the net look for. Sure
we could take that out and do something else...but then they won't be able to
detect signatures and that would be very bad....

This should probably be won't fixed...

Comment 2

[Daniel Glazman (:glazou) (not active in Mozilla any more)]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Sorry Daniel but --\n is the universal character string that precede a
> signature. That's what all the mail clients out there on the net look for. Sure
> we could take that out and do something else...but then they won't be able to
> detect signatures and that would be very bad....

mscott, I think you misunderstood. I want to avoid typing </Daniel> all the time
just above my .signature. So I included it in the fhe file PLUS the separator
"--\n" line between </daniel> and what's supposed to be below the line. But
Thunderbird ends up creating blank messages like

  --
  </Daniel>
  --
  blah blah

Comment 3

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

I think an algorithm which said:

"If the string "-- \n" is not present in the defined signature, add it to the
beginning" would be perfectly reasonable. It would keep the existing behaviour,
wouldn't break sig detection, but would allow people to add text above the
signature sep as well as below it.

Gerv

Comment 4

[Daniel Glazman (:glazou) (not active in Mozilla any more)]

Guys, I was supposing the -- line is made of "--\n" (or "--\r" on some platforms).
But it's not! And the feature I am looking for is in fact already implemented,
but it looks for "-- \n" and "-- \r" (please note the whitespace).

Cf.
http://lxr.mozilla.org/aviarybranch/source/mailnews/compose/src/nsMsgCompose.cpp#3468

I just checked it works as expected. So I am closing the current bug as WFM but
can't help wondering if we should not detect "--\n" and "--\r" too...

Comment 5

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

> I... can't help wondering if we should not detect "--\n" and "--\r" too...

No, it shouldn't, because unfortunately many user agents don't recognise that as
a sigsep. So we shouldn't encourage its use by recognising it.

Still, glad you've found what you want :-)

Gerv