Paul_King reported that emailed replies to private messages (PMs) on the forum are not stripping email signatures or prior message threads, unlike replies to forum topics — suggesting a possible regression. Ethsim2 suggested toggling email settings, but that didn’t resolve the issue. tobiaseigen noted this may be client-specific, particularly with Outlook, and advised manually editing emails before sending. Paul_King confirmed the behavior was new and only appeared when using the Outlook Android app — not Windows Outlook. Testing confirmed that adding the standard email signature separator (-- ) on its own line in the Android Outlook signature successfully stripped the signature and trailing thread Paul_King. tobiaseigen speculated that Outlook for Android may not insert the separator by default, potentially indicating a Microsoft bug — which Paul_King confirmed and reported. The core issue appears isolated to Outlook Android’s signature handling, and the workaround is to manually include the separator.
Not sure if this is intended behaviour, but I just discovered that my emailed reply to a forum PM message notification sent to me, was automatically posted to the forum complete with my email signature, along with the full email thread leading to my reply (duplicating content already visible in the PM thread online).
Is there any reason why emailed replies to PM notifications should behave differently to emailed replies to forum topic notifications?
Emailed replies to topic notifications normally have my signature, and any email thread that follows it automatically stripped out.
Could this be some sort of regression associated with a recent update?
Is this a change you are reporting? A new behavior to something you’ve done before? Or are you doing something you’ve not done before and expecting a different behavior than you are seeing?
This sometimes happens depending on the email client you are using. Outlook is notoriously hard to work with.
We will often edit replies we receive by email to fix formatting or to remove extraneous text.
The only want to be certain is to edit your email before sending to remove the content you don’t want to have posted.
I think this is new behaviour, as I have not seen it before with other PMs posted from the same outlook email application.
I also regularly reply by email to the main forum topics on my own forum, and here from Outlook - with none of my signatures or previous thread (consisting of the original notification) coming through
This stuff is hard to troubleshoot, I’m afraid. Could you test it using gmail or some other email client, and see if you are able to replicate the problem?
I think this may be new behaviour, as I have not seen it before with other PMs posted from outlook.
I also regularly reply by email to the main forum topics on my own forum, and to here, from Outlook - with none of my signatures or previous thread (consisting of the original notification) coming through.
In fairness this is usually from Outlook in Windows, and it occurs to me the issue was exposed using the Outlook app on my Android Mobile phone.
EDIT : … and now I can see the phone version of my signature is not being stripped out, although the notification email I replied to is being stripped out.
Interesting! So maybe this can be isolated to outlook for android. I looked at the message source for your post and don’t see the -- signature separator. Maybe you want to add that to your signature on outlook on your phone?
Might be interesting for you to try to reply to the same post by email using outlook on your windows machine and again using outlook on your phone, to see if it successfully strips out the signature.
Hopefully if everything following the separator is removed, then my PM replies will also have the trailing thread stripped off too, as they are to the main forum
Yes, that is the idea with the signature separator - everything below it is stripped.
Can you check one thing for me? When you set up a new signature for outlook for android, does it insert the -- separator by default, and you removed it? Or did they neglect to insert it by default? If so then that may be a bug report to send to Microsoft.
