[Mailman-Users] multiple footers accumulating on messages as discussion progresses - how to eliminate all but the last mailman footer?

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 5:56 AM, David <dave at fiteyes.com> wrote:
> I'm not sure what you call the long tail of footers that accumulates on
> messages,

Collateral damage from MUAs That Only A Professional Programmer Who
Hates His Job (And His Users) Could Love[tm].  Because of the
potential for damaging author's content, this really should be handled
by the author's MUA, but the only ones I know of that do are based on
Emacs, which sort of rules out usage by all but a miniscule fraction
of the user population.

> but I would like to eliminate all prior footers (from the same list).

As Mark points out, this is hard to do well, and impossible to do
right (where we define "right" to mean "cannot possibly damage the
author's intended content").

However, the code he suggests should do very well (up to 100% for
lists where top-posting is the rule, at least if you're able and
willing to look at any posts where it doesn't work and tweak the
regexps a bit).

If users are really bothered by it, Gmail does a very good job of
eliding quoted content, including footers.  (A user has to be pretty
bothered to even think about changing his MUA, of course.  But it's
possible some are looking for alternatives anyway.)

> I would think this is a common request, but I can't find any
> mention of it anywhere.

Does this actually bother your users?  IME lists where this is a
problem, it's a much smaller problem than top-posting itself, and the
users aren't going to notice because they don't read any of the
included content anyway.  I suspect that's why nobody (that I can
remember) has ever asked for this before.