GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 736985
Signature separator
Last modified: 2021-07-05 13:28:10 UTC
As was mentioned in bug #712895, the standard, for plain-text emails at least, is to precede the signature with a single line containing "-- ". Not only do we not do that, we make it impossible for the user to do it by hand: Thanks to bug #731746, we strip off trailing spaces. I see a number of possible solutions. 1) Allow the user to have their signature begin with "-- ". Practically, this means detecting this line in our flowed-text formatter and treating it specially. We'll have to do this for any of the other solutions, so I'll go ahead and do it. 2) Automatically insert "-- " before the signature when it's added to the composer. This seems to be controversial in #712895. 3) Have an option to insert the separator or not. 4) Only insert the separator in the plain text component. This would mean adding it at send-time, not insertion-time, so the user wouldn't get a chance to see it before it went out. 5) Only insert the separator when in the plain text compose mode. This assumes that the people who care about the separator are the same people who insist on plain text emails, which doesn't seem unreasonable. It might fool people into thinking the separator will be in the plain text version of their HTML emails, which isn't true. I don't know what we would want to do when the user switched compose formats.
Created attachment 286651 [details] [review] Don't strip trailing space from signature separator This does (1), which will also be needed by any of the other solutions.
Review of attachment 286651 [details] [review]: Looks good, Robert. Please insert a comment before the code that explains why this particular line is exceptional, then commit!
At this point, I think I'd rather leave it up to the user to manually add their signature separator (if any) in the edit box rather than offer options or automatically insert it. Do you have a leaning on this?
Comment on attachment 286651 [details] [review] Don't strip trailing space from signature separator I'll leave this bug open while we're considering other changes to how the signature separator should be handled. I don't use signatures myself, so I have no strong opinions. But people who do seem to care a lot, so letting them set things up however they like may be a good strategy. We could populate the signature box with "-- \n" initially to indicate to people that they can include it if they want it. Attachment 286651 [details] pushed as 17b481d - Don't strip trailing space from signature separator
Sounds good. I too don't have strong opinions, although I do use signatures (now) and don't use a top-dash separator. Yet another tricky email issue. Three users, four use-cases.
I see that Robert's patch was pushed to master. I don't have strong opinions on how to handle signatures. Options 4) and 5) might be the best ones.
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