Email forward/reply character handling?

June 11, 2008 12:02 PM

Is there a resource that lists all the different email programs' handling of forward/reply formatting? I want to write a program that receives emails, but I know some email apps add ">" characters and newlines that I'll have to strip out- I don't want to miss too many edge cases.

This will be a Rails app so I was hoping there'd be a plugin for email handling, but I haven't come across one that has this particular feature. A list would be great, or a script in Ruby or another language that I can modify.

posted by squishy to computers & internet (2 answers total)

I use Agent. One of the mechanisms it has permits me to control for myself what kind of prefix sequence is used for quotes. I usually use "|| " but it can be anything at all, because I enter it in a field in a popup.

Which is a problem for you. I could use "squishy> ", for instance, and I have been known to do things like that in cases where I was interspersing quotes from multiple people, in order to keep them straight.
posted by Class Goat at 12:35 PM on June 11, 2008

I'm going to have to say "you're doing it wrong." Really, you don't want to go down this path. There are many mail clients that allow the user to configure their own reply quoting prefix. For instance, what are you going to do for an email that prefixes lines with "[squishy=>"?
posted by rhizome at 2:56 PM on June 11, 2008