Only append "Info Signatures" on the first email of a thread about mailpile HOT 4 CLOSED

We've debated this quite a bit - I still think it's the wrong way to address the admittedly "spammy" nature of e-mail signatures.

To publicly document why I dislike the idea:

• Although redundant, I consider message signatures to be important parts of the content of e-mail. I use them (far more frequently than I use business cards) and their usefulness would be severely degraded if they were only present in some mails and not others.
• I do not think we should do anything that removes potentially useful information from the mail flow.
• I feel this proposal is somewhat pointless - even if we did kill outgoing signatures, our users wouldn't really notice a difference for quite some time, because most incoming mail is authored by other mail clients that won't follow this pattern.
• Users who don't want to have outgoing signatures at all, are free to not use that feature.
• Users who request a signature in Mailpile should have their request honoured by the app at all times, not some of the time, based on an inflexible and imprecise algorithm.
• Signatures are branding, both personal and potentially for Mailpile itself. Good branding should be tasteful and consistent.

That said, I do feel that it would be very appropriate for Mailpile to do the following to make signatures less annoying:

• Encourage our own users to keep their outgoing signatures short and sweet. Maybe provide templates that suck less?
• Make it easy for users to add structured signatures instead of ad-hoc text (attaching vcards or using microformats (hCard) in HTML mail)
• Add features to the UI to make incoming signatures more useful (there are hints of this in the UI of Mailpile today) - this means detecting incoming vcard/hcards and when possible making sense of the contents of ad-hoc text signatures.
• Add features to the UI to make incoming signatures less annoying (hide them from view much of the time, by collapsing them)

(Note: I'm removing the low-hanging-fruit label from this, as I feel it's quite unfair to volunteers to encourage them to work on stuff that the core team doesn't even agree should be implemented at all. Recategorizing as a discussion.)

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GMail hides signatures behind a [...] and has a very good detection IMHO. That would be a good compromise IMHO for a feature on the receiver's end. I agree that adding new signature options for a sender might not be a good idea. Signature templates would be cool!

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RFC-3676 defines how .signatures are demarcated in message bodies: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3676#section-4.3

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I think the solution we have for this is decent at present. Still working on integrating signatures in useful ways, but closing for now!

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