🚀 go-pugleaf

It's traditional in some quarters, when sending a E-mail message or
posting a news article, to precede the signature (especially if
included from a .signature file) by the string

	"-- \n"

i.e. two hyphens, a space, and a newline.  The standard mail and news
posting packages for gnuemacs, for example, do this.  So does rn.

I recall hearing that this was originally for the benefit of some
early Unix mail-reading programs, which displayed the signature only
if requested (and in the days of 300 baud dialups, that wasn't very
often).  Can someone verify this, and/or supply more details?

If the story is true, is there any mail- or news-reading software
still out there that has this feature?  If not, is there any point in
maintaining the old signature separator, or should it be considered
obsolete?


|-------Do we still need this?
v
-- 
Robert S. Maier   | Internet: rsm@math.arizona.edu
Dept. of Math.    | UUCP: uunet!arizona!amethyst!rsm
Univ. of Arizona  | Bitnet: maier@arizrvax
Tucson, AZ  85721 | FAX: +1 602 621 8322
U.S.A.            | Voice(POTS): +1 602 621 6893  /  +1 602 621 2617