In article ,
mm wrote:
snippage about signature delimiter
But WADR I'm not convinced it's true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_block says nothing about any
required delimiter.

Except it does--the last paragraph under "Email and Usenet" metions that
it "must be delimited from the body of the message by a single line
consisting of exactly two hyphens, followed by a space, followed by the
end of line...."

snip again

http://www.smfr.org/mtnw/docs/Usenet.html says only:
"Avoid long rambling signatures. Keep your sig short and simple.
MT-NewsWatcher encourages the "McQuary limit" for signatures-at most
four lines of at most 80 characters each; if you enter a longer sig in
the Personalities dialog, it will warn you. You cannot enter a sig
longer than 8 lines."

That's because MT-NewsWatcher automatically inserts the delimiter for
you. I know, as I use it and have it insert a signature. (It's a quite
nice newsreader program, by the way.)

I could keep looking, but I have other reasons to think a sig file
needs no delimiter.

It's a long-standing convention in Usenet that the signature should be
preceded by a dash-dash-space delimiter. I guess it's not "needed" in
the sense that you can send a message without one, but there are good
reasons to play along with the accepted rules, too. A great many
newsreaders will automatically trim off signatures thus demarked when
creating a followup message, for example.

--
Andrew Erickson

"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot
lose." -- Jim Elliot