"Hugh Daniels said here on Dec 28: There are very good reasons to build remailers (and all mail tools) to pass on all the bytes they can, trailing spaces and .sigs included." "Hugh doesn't say what these reasons are. They are not obvious to me, so I must disagree. I've already stated what I think are good reasons at least for remailers whose purpose is anonymity to remove automatic sigs which are likley to destroy anonymity." I can think of a few ... (1) it's a bad precedent to rewrite contents. one program's apparent signature could be another program's data or instruction. (2) it is unnecessary complexity and falls under KISS, IE, 'Keep It Simple, Simon'. (-: (3) It is less robust and portable as a result of having this additional complexity. ( I use 'portable' not in the conventional compiler- specific manner, but more to apply to a given application's usability for future, yet-to-be- known applications, IE, flexibility. ) In this respect it fails to conform to requirements for a good software 'tool'. It is the user's job to hide his or her identity, but it should not be the programmer's responsibility to anticipate the user's failure to think at all. Someone who uses these tools without understanding the principles upon which they are founded - such as people whom accept keys from individuals whom are only electronically known - will quickly founder upon their own, um, state of stupor, and one should not undertake to protect them from this, as what you are pro- -tecting them from, in reality, is the opportunity to learn from their mistakes. "I've said I would accept either a less ambiguous sig delimiter than "--" or a remailer option to remove the sig (default) or leave it in." Until there is a convention, IE, an RFC or ANSI standard for signatures, it would be unwise to build in any assumption. I just realized an excellent example. For years, I've been signing myself ... -- richard ... such that everything after my name - IE, contact data - would be trimmed off. Not well thought out ... I have actually seen this in the case of a few mail servers that rewrite contents ( such as the elec- -tric vehicles digest, EV-L ). -- richard ===== -- richard childers rchilder@us.oracle.com 1 415 506 2411 oracle data center -- unix systems & network administration "If Life is a drama, then, surely, the hardest parts go to the most skillful."