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I am creating a web based email client using c# asp.net.
What is confusing is that various email clients seem to add the original text in alot of different ways when replying by email.
What I was wondering is that, if there is some sort of standardized way, to disambiguate this process?
Thank you
-Theo
There isn’t a standardized way, but a sensible heuristic will get you a good distance.
Some algorithms classify lines based on their initial character(s) and by comparing the text to a corpus of marked up text, yielding a statistical probability for each line that it is a) part of the same block as the next/previous one and b) quoted text, a signature, new text, etc.
It’d be worth trying out some of the most popular e-mail clients and creating and comparing some sample messages to see what the differences are. Usenet newsgroups may also help you build a reasonable corpus of messages to work from. HTML e-mail adds an extra level of complexity of course, tthough most compliant mail clients will included the corresponding plain text as well. Different languages also cause issues, as clients which can parse “Paul wrote:” may fall over at “Pablo ha scritto:”.