Just what is the character string that chops off the end of replied-to emails?
It looks like a space then two hyphens - but there's more to it, I guess.
Trimming email replies
Mar 26, 2025
Last reply: 1 year ago
9 Replies
hyphen hyphen space carriage return.
See RFC 1849, in particular section 4.3.2
formatting link
You seem to be referring to a "signature-delimiter"
| If a poster or posting agent does append | a signature to an article, the signature SHOULD be preceded with a | delimiter line containing (only) two hyphens (ASCII 45) followed by | one blank (ASCII 32).
Nope. That's all there is space hyphen hyphen newline
Grr. hyphen hyphen space [newline]
Thank you all, especially for the technical name of the pesky critter.
Without that my googling was a waste of much time.
PA
Bit like using a dictionary to check spelling :-)
And it doesn't cut anything off. It's a separator between the body text and your sig, allowing the news app to avoid including your sig in replies.
Is that "carriage return", "line feed" or some combination? Or does that depend on something in the header?
Press the Return key. Your client will deal with converting that to whatever's expected on the socket when talking to the NNTP server (which I think is CR+LF, but don't quote me on that).
When you see the posting in an editor, it'll use whatever line endings are traditional for your system (CR+LF for DOS/Windows, LF for Unix, CR for Classic MacOS, ...). Conversion is all handled behind the scenes by your client.
Theo
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