[Coco] Moratorium on using double-dash?

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 05 December 2013 09:41:02 Andrew did opine:

> Ok, I know I've complained about this before; I don't really expect this
> to go anywhere, I'm just venting, I guess.
> 
> Does anyone else on here use Thunderbird and get the list as a digest?
> 
> When I do a reply to the digest, anything after a "double-dash" gets
> turned "grey" (though something else turns it back to "normal") - and
> any of the messages after that point aren't a part of the reply. Thus, I
> can't delete the portion I want, etc. to get what I do want (because
> inevitably, it's after the double-dash.
> 
> There's been a bug fix request submitted to the TB team; that was years
> ago, though - nothing has been done.

And likely will not be fixed, albeit it might be productive to ask that its 
implementation is correct.  It sounds as if its somehow broken in your 
particular instance.

But let me explain a bit. At the bottom of this message is one such 
occurrence, following my "Cheers, Gene\r" and the rest of the stuff called 
a sig, but there is an invisible to you, space after that second dash, and 
that space, to be correctly detected as the "End of Message Body" marker, 
must in turn be followed by a newline.  It is also checked for only at the 
beginning of the line, not in the middle of it, so the actual search term 
used should be all 5 characters of \r--_\r where I have replaced the space 
with an underscore. 

The purpose of this "marker" is so that when you hit the reply button, the 
body text is included in the reply, but none of my "sig" twaddle is.

And this has been the convention for proper handling of email quoting for 
at least 20 years.  Well ingrained by now.

> If you notice, I'm avoiding using it here in this "rant"; I try to do so
> for this and other lists I am on (admittedly, not many nowadays). Maybe
> I should change my subscribed email on this list to my virtual host,
> then use that server to process these digests and remove the
> double-dashes then forward them on...
> 
> Seems like a lot of work; I just don't understand why Thunderbird seems
> to be the only mail client that interprets a double-dash symbol this
> way...
> 
> bah.
> 
> Andrew L. Ayers
> Glendale, Arizona
> http://www.phoenixgarage.org/
> 
> --

From your email agent, the above -- has no trailing space, but I have no 
clue what it might mean on a winderz box.  It could be that since you are 
putting it in the sig, that you need to edit the sig and add that missing 
space.  But I don't think that will fix your problem.  What editor are you 
useing to compose the reply's?

Cheers, Gene
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>

I'm not an Iranian!!  I voted for Dianne Feinstein!!
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