Identifying e-mail signatures and quoted text

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I have an application that pulls messages from a POP3/IMAP server and processes the content into a ticket system. It works beautifully.

I would love to be able to identify and remove quoted text and e-mail signatures. I'd consider myself a regex expert but this is one case in which I don't want to reinvent the wheel if I don't have to.

If anyone has seen code to do this, please share.

Some e-mail clients do this with various degrees of success. If you've seen one that works well and is open-source, please let me know.

In the form of a question for Sergey: Is there an algorithm to identify the signature or quoted part of an e-mail? or; How can I identify the signtaure or quoted part of an e-mail?

Posted 26-Feb-13 10:26am

Yvan Rodrigues

Updated 26-Feb-13 14:13pm

v4

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 26-Feb-13 22:02pm

Thank you for the form of question specially for me, I really appreciate it. But please understand: we are overwhelmed by non-questions these days. You are the one who is interested the most in making a distinct form of a question. At least your question won't be removed immediately by accident.

Thank you for understanding...
—SA

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 26-Feb-13 22:07pm

Now, what do you mean by both? You don't mean digital signatures, do you?
What is the "quoted pair", exactly? If I put some clause in quotation mark, will it be a "quoted pair".

I'm afraid, no matter what algorithm you are going to invent, there is no a reliable solution, by one simple reason: there is nearly nothing in the e-mail content standards. Only headers, sections, and remaining content, without any further structure. Whatever criteria you apply, there will be false negatives and false positives.

In other words, the problem is not the algorithms, but lack of information...

Do I miss anything?
—SA

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