email disclaimer <insert; remove and instert>

[Jeffrey Goldberg]

On Jul 29, 2008, at 6:13 AM, Odhiambo Washington wrote:

> I can tell you it is "impossible". Why?
> While you can actually write a script to try to do it, you'll more
> likely end up breaking the e-mail format, because it will not be too
> easy to rightly guess the content-type/boundaries in replies.

If one converted all messages to mutlipart/mixed and added the  
disclaimer as text/plain part with a content-disposition: inline, then  
you might be able to safely ensure that each message had exactly one  
copy of the disclaimer.  But any script will have to be fully and  
completely aware of all MIME structures, so using various perl  
libraries is where I would start.

But of course you are right in that if you were replying to an  
unsnipped reply there is no way to know the structure of the quoted  
material in the first reply, so removing it from the quoted section  
may well be impossible to do reliably.

On a side note, I'm wondering if the original poster is familiar with  
the arguments presented in

   http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/

I haven't updated that in years, but I think that the points still hold.

-j