>> I would take issue with the statement that the "-- " demarcation for
>> signature blocks is widely used. A review of the archives of this list
>> would seem to indicate that it used by less than half the participants,
>
>which beats the hell out of zero, which is what Listserv currently
>assumes, judging two messages with identical content but different
>.sigs as different.

I think that what has been overlooked in this discussion is the
*REASON* that Listserv checks for duplicate posts.

I believe it is to catch messages which get duplicated during the mail
transport process rather than to catch the occasional double-send
by a poster.  Very likely, a hash algorithm is simply applied to the
entire message body without parsing it at all.

The case of avoiding duplicate posts with different signatures is hardly
going to be common enough to merit Listserv software analyzing every
message to check for it.

Stan