Date   : Fri, 15 Oct 2004 22:12:51 +0100
From   : "Peter Edwards" <samwise@...>
Subject: Re: Signitures

> > Returning to the original OT subject of this thread, where 
> are the rigid
> > rules of news group message format defined?
> 
> Do you mean news (i.e. usenet), or email? 
> 
> Email seems to be covered by RFC822, and news (the message format) by
> RFC1036 - however a quick glance doesn't show either of them 
> to mention
> anything about signatures. I think it's just something of an unspoken
> standard that '--' on a line by itself is a signature 
> separator - but as
> far as I can tell there's nothing in the specs to say that, nor the
> actual purpose of the signature...
> 
> cheers
> 
> Jules

Hoyt Duff complained about this in a recent editorial in Linux Format
magazine.  Section 4.3 of RFC 3676 touches on the subject but, at the end of
the day, the double-dash separator is simply a convention and is not a
standard.  Hoyt was moaning because KMail's documentation states it's a
standard when it actually isn't.  I'm not sure which was the first email
client to borrow the idea from usenet but it's been around a while ....

http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3676.txt

Peter.