[kde-linux] Am I Alone?

[Duncan]

James Tyrer posted on Sat, 03 Oct 2009 14:28:06 -0700 as excerpted:

>>> Definitely not.
>>>
>>> Anne
>>>
>>>
>>> 
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>>>
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>> 
>> Whatever you say, but this is what happens when I reply to your
>> message.
>> 
>> However, when I reply to my message to the list, everything after and
>> including "-- " is not copied into the reply.
>> 
>> It was my understanding that the "-- " was supposed to come before your
>> name as in my previous postings.  The fault might be in Thunderbird, or
>> it might be something else about your message, but with the "-- " above
>> the name it works and with it below the name, it doesn't appear to. 
>> So, I am trying this the other way and will see if that is the problem
>> or if it is something else.
>> 
> OK, then it is something else and I don't know what.  But, as you can
> see above, your messages don't work in Thunderbird.

FWIW, the agreed sig delimiter is specific.  With CRLF indicating the 
line terminating Carriage Return, Line Feed sequence for Internet 
messages according to the RFCs, and the sig delimiter is supposed to be 
this sequence:

CRLF-- CRLF

Thus, it's supposed to be "-- " on its own line, the space after the two 
dashes being significant.

Now MSOE (possibly among others but they were the popular client that got 
it wrong first) screwed things up with its implementation which in MIME/
Quoted-printable mode would first put the space in as the sig delimiter 
as it should, then strip the space as QP specifies that a line cannot end 
with a space, so the space should have be escaped to preserve it, only it 
wasn't, they stripped it instead.

As a result of that and various other implementation details and bugs, 
plus the fact that the sig delimiter never made it into a formal 
standard, implementations DO very somewhat.

What pan, which I use, does, is look for "--" with or without a space, on 
its own line.  If there is more than ONE such line, it will take the LAST 
one, using it as a delimiter, and stripping everything below it.  
Usually, this gets it correct, but occasionally someone uses a "--" on 
its own line in the body and the results can be a bit comical.  
Fortunately, pan also follows the convention of quoting selected text 
only, if something is selected, so it's possible to work around the 
issue, quoting the desired part (including quoting just the sig if 
desired), by selecting it first.  Of course, that only works if there's 
only one part to select, but it's reasonable.

What may be happening here is that thunderbird is seeing that long line 
of dashes and taking that as a second sig delimiter.  Perhaps more 
likely, I've not looked, the message is in MIME format, with the sig in 
the message part itself, and the "mailing list..." bit appended to the 
end, outside the MIME delimiters.  That would be confusing for a lot of 
clients, some of which would consider everything outside the MIME text as 
extraneous and not show it (many implementations put a plain text 
explanation for older non-MIME clients there saying this is a message in 
MIME format, if you're reading this, your client is showing the plain 
text...), some would, whatever.  But that confusing behavior does happen 
to be what a lot of mailing list software does with its "list sig".

Anyway, I've seen some of Anne's messages come thru without the trailing 
space, most I look at seem to have it.  I know what the issue is, but 
it's not one that bothers me, so I've not mentioned it or posted on it 
until now.  But Anne, it does appear /one/ of your clients either doesn't 
have the space or strips it, at least /part/ of the time.  Beyond that, 
I'm not sure what's causing the various different behaviors with the sig 
and the "list sig", but that's where I'd look if I cared enough to 
investigate.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman