Dividers

What are dividers?

Let's consider an email reply. While we naturally come to think of a reply as a new document, like a new email, it is in fact still only one document that we collectively work on and send back and forth. Mostly in html.

So technically it is quite difficult to separate where each reply actually starts and stops. The mail standard does not have a method that every email client adheres to in order to segregate each reply from the next.

And this is a challenge because the whole world is using "sent from my android" and we only want to substitute the generic signatures that belong to our replies.

The picture below illustrates this. As you can see the reply at the top does NOT contain a foot print. The user has no generic signature.

But the original mail below does contain "sent from my iPhone". And in order to not accidentally substitute that for our signature we must be able to separate our reply from the original email.

So dividers are words or code that can be used to find the separating line between our reply and the original email.

DSTA will search for these dividers in the complete source code of the email, so text from the messages source code are used. Not just the message text. This is important because often a mail client will use certain CSS styles or formatting code that can be used to signal the separation. E.g. you will find "gmail_quote" in the formatting code of a Gmail reply.

We have added a fair amount of basic words from across Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo and a few others. But we have certainly not uncover all, and if you use a non-english language there is a few missing for sure.

Source code

To get at the source code you can right-click in the content pane of an email in Outlook, and then choose "Source code"

What to watch for

A mail header does however have a standardised way of telling if a mail is a reply or a new mail. DSTA has set the strategy so if knowing it is working with a reply, and it is unable to find a divider, it will refrain from adding any signature. Thus you may on occasion find that no signature is added to a reply.

The way to remedy this is to look at the original mail of a reply that did not get a signature (text and source code) and see if there is any sort of marker you can add to the dividers list.