Strip signatures and replies from emails

user_2432668 0
Viewed 21480

I'm currently working on a system that allows users to reply to notification emails that are sent out (sigh).

I need to strip out the replies and signatures, so that I'm left with the actual content of the reply, without all the noise.

Does anyone have any suggestions about the best way to do this?

ruby email parsing
9 Answers

If your system is in-house and/or you have a limited number of reply formats, it's possible to do a pretty good job. Here are the filters we have set up for email responses to trac tickets:

Drop all text after and including:

  1. Lines that equal '-- \n' (standard email sig delimiter)
  2. Lines that equal '--\n' (people often forget the space in sig delimiter; and this is not that common outside sigs)
  3. Lines that begin with '-----Original Message-----' (MS Outlook default)
  4. Lines that begin with '________________________________' (32 underscores, Outlook again)
  5. Lines that begin with 'On ' and end with ' wrote:\n' (OS X Mail.app default)
  6. Lines that begin with 'From: ' (failsafe four Outlook and some other reply formats)
  7. Lines that begin with 'Sent from my iPhone'
  8. Lines that begin with 'Sent from my BlackBerry'

Numbers 3 and 4 are 'begin with' instead of 'equals' because sometimes users will squash lines together on accident.

We try to be more liberal about stripping out replies, since it's much more of an annoyance (to us) have reply garbage than it is to correct missing text.

Anybody have other formats from the wild that they want to share?

user_2291350
user_6682450

I made one for golang: https://github.com/web-ridge/email-reply-parser it detects signatures like

Karen The Green
Graphic Designer
Office
Tel: +44423423423423
Fax: +44234234234234
karen@webby.com
Street 2, City, Zeeland, 4694EG, NL
www.thing.com

The content of this email is confidential and intended for the recipient specified in message only. It is strictly forbidden to share any part of this message with any third party, without a written consent of the sender. If you received this message by mistake, please reply to this message and follow with its deletion, so that we can ensure such a mistake does not occur in the future.


Met vriendelijke groeten,
Richard Lindhout
user_25084810
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