Strip signatures and replies from emails

Question

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 signature

Answer 1

If you want something powerful & robust, and don't mind reading academic publications, you might check out this:

• Learning to Extract Signature and Reply Lines from Email

Here's the homepage for one of the authors, with more info & some downloads:

• Vitor R. Carvalho - Software and Datasets - (Vitor Carvalho)

Answer 2

I don't believe you can do this reliably (signatures used to begin with '--' but I don't see that anymore). Perhaps you're better off asking people to reply inbetween text headers and then simply strip the reply from this ? It's not elegant, but perhaps more reliable.

e.g.

REPLY BETWEEN HERE -->

AND HERE -->

so you'd simply look for the required headers above and take what's inbetween.