Clean up email reply footer?

[cheviron]

When a user is subscribed to email notifications and they reply to the email to post to the board, the footer part of the email message gets included in the user's post, like this:

If you reply to this email, your message will be added to the discussion below:

http://xxxxxx.nabble.com/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

To start a new topic under xxxxxxx, email [e-mail]
To unsubscribe from xxxxxxxx, click here.
NAML

If lots of people do this, it starts to include lots of these footers and quotes from email messages making the board cluttered. Is there any way to clean this up or disable it?

Thanks!

[GregChapman]

You're going to start me on a rant.

Why stop at having the footer removed? What I find annoying is when a reply is made to the previous message and its entire contents are appended to the reply and when someone then replies to that reply you get ever extending repeats of the original post, making it almost impossible to detect the new content in the middle of all the repeated stuff, especially when there's a one line response to a lengthy original post.

The reality is that, on forums, people who top-post their replies over the original message are a pain of the highest order and need to be discouraged from posting using that technique.

How you handle it all depends on whether you regard your forum as an archive of emails or a forum and what method the majority of your users adopt for posting to the forum. You need to advise your users accordingly with clear FAQs posted to the forum, followed up with individual personal emails to those who abuse the conventions and rules you have set out.

In the meantime you can set the administrator permission to allow editing of users messages and manually remove parts of any post that offends your forum's rules and conventions.

(If you've got a neat forum, with irrelevant clutter edited out, then don't go removing offenders footers before you've given them a chance to visit the forum and see what a mess they're making of its well ordered appearance. Point out that they can visit the forum and edit their own posts if they realise they've made a mistake after hitting their SEND button.)

Having said all that, Yahoo!Groups (at least, if you use their "Traditional" rather than "Fully Featured" format) have a very specialised footer commencing with a line of 36 hyphens that they detect. The line and all following text removed when an email gets archived to the group page on their site, so your request would not be impossible to achieve.

However, Nabble uses a different approach and, when quoting becomes excessive, it truncates the post with a "... [show rest of quote]" link.