Tom Martin

This morning I discovered net-mail/t-prot. It's specifically designed for mutt users, but it should work with other MUAs, providing they're not one of these new fangled bloated graphical things.

Anyway, here's a URL: URL

The idea behind it was originally just to filter out classic TOFU, that is, "text oben, full-quote unten". This is a mish-mash of German and English meaning "text above -- full quote below", or just top posting to the rest of us.

However, t-prot filters out more than just TOFU. It gets rid of Outlook garbage and it can trim commercial and mailing list footers (or whatever footer you like). It can truncate RFC uncomformant signatures that are over four lines long. It does a bunch of other things too: trimming whitespace, repeated punctuation, blank lines, etc.

The best bit is that because it's just used as a display_filter in mutt, the original mail is unchanged. This means there're no strings attached, so try it out.

Just for the hell of it, here's a screenshot before (left) and after (right). Click on the images for full-size, if you're bored.

Interestingly, the person having their mail snipped by t-prot for having a huge RFC unconformant signature is also part of the ASCII ribbon campaign. It takes all sorts, I suppose.