[Wontfix] 2 Dumb Dashes

[26F36DD]

I have a feature removal request: When we have our signature as a picture it always puts 2 dumb dashes above it. I wish that you would take those dashes, take a shovel and put them 6 feet under. All they do is annoy us.

I just edited this to add one more request: It would be nice if we could have an option on where to put signatures like left, center or right.

Those 2 improvements could save a lot of clicks.

Thanks.

[fred8615]

The dashes are there because that was/is considered proper etiquette for signatures, to differentiate them from the regular text. It's a default in Thunderbird (which of course FossaMail is based on), but curiously, not in Windows Live Mail, or the Win 8 mail app.

[Moonchild]

The signature and delimiter are described in RFC1855 and RFC3676.
dash-dash-space-newline is the standard delimiter for a signature, and FossaMail honors it. For example, many corporate mails will have extended disclaimers or instructions in the signature and FossaMail, when hitting reply, will NOT quote the signature (since it would be pointless to quote and irrelevant to the conversation). Would you prefer getting your signature sent back to you in every reply you get?

It's a (de facto) standard for e-mail, even though it originated in usenet. If Windows mail applications don't honor it, then they are the ones breaking with this standard (I know for a fact that GMail supports it, but Outlook.com apparently does not...)

EDIT:

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. When
generating a Format=Flowed message containing a Usenet-style
separator before the signature, the separator line is sent as-is.
This is a special case; an (optionally quoted or quoted and stuffed)
line consisting of DASH DASH SP is neither fixed nor flowed.

Generating agents MUST NOT end a paragraph with such a signature
line.

A receiving agent needs to test for a signature line both before the
test for a quoted line (see Section 4.5) and also after logically
counting and deleting quote marks and stuffing (see Section 4.4) from
a quoted line.

[26F36DD]

We believe in user choice right? How about we get the options to choose? Dumb dashes, no dumb dashes, right, left, center...

[Moonchild]

I repeat: they are not dumb dashes. You use a signature; the program properly delimits the signature with the standard convention delimiter so the receiving mail client knows that whatever follows is a sig and not to be considered part of the body of the mail. This has nothing to do with user choice, and everything to do with best practices.

[fred8615]

And to explain Moonchild's point a little simpler, by using the dashes, the email recipient, if he/she sends a reply, their email client shouldn't include your sig in the quoted part of the reply. Now that's annoying! It would happen to me all the time when I was using either Win mail program I mentioned before. And, it's a waste of bandwidth. Especially if you're using a picture sig.

[26F36DD]

My signature is a picture of a power plant. Everyone knows where it begins and ends just by looking at it.

[Moonchild]

My signature is a picture of a power plant. Everyone knows where it begins and ends just by looking at it.

You obviously completely missed the point.

Anyway, bottom line is, I'm not going to change this in FossaMail since it's a good feature of a very long-standing practice. If you feel the "dumb dashes" are too disruptive then you can always start using the Windows Mail client or Outlook.com or whatnot.

[26F36DD]

No. I got the point long ago but my situation isn't yours. So basically you don't believe in choice and since I don't agree I should leave. Got it.

[Moonchild]

I do believe in choice, but not when it goes against established practice and internet-wide recommendations (let alone RFCs).

But I guess you're having a bad day and needed something to complain about.