HOME
TOPICS
ABOUT ME
MAIL

 
It's time to do something about those stupid "greater than" symbols. It's time to do something about needlessly forwarded e-mail, too.
  technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

How to clean those crazy brackets from forwarded mail


May 29, 2002


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2002, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2002, The Post-Standard

   I hate forwarded mail. It's dumb. Worse that that, it's hard to read.
   Forwarded mail is usually full of crazy little angle bracket characters. Every line of the message that's forwarded usually starts out with a bracket. Or maybe with two of them. Sometimes I get messages that were forwarded by people who forwarded them to people who then forwarded them again -- you get my point -- and those triple- and quadruple-forwarded messages sometimes have three or four of those dang angle brackets stuck in front of every line.
   Stop the world! Or at least put in in pause mode. It's time to do something about those stupid "greater than" symbols. It's time to do something about needlessly forwarded e-mail, too.
   I'll be straight with you. You and I can complain forever about how crazy it is to forward mail. We might as well be whistling into our Dixie Cups. No one listens. Or no one seems to listen. Just about everybody I've talked to about this tells me they have a Constitutional right (or something close to it) to forward anything they want.
   What's really crazy about this is the fact that most people who forward mail don't even read it first. (Why do I know this? Because I know what makes people tick. You do, too. We both know that when your sister-in-law sends you the latest virus hoax message - the kind that is totally pointless and completely false -- she's doing it because she saw the subject line of the message and clicked the forward button. if she had actually read the message, she probably would have realized it was pointless, right?)
   So if you can't get other people to stop forwarding pointless messages, we can use the 12-Step method and work on improving ourselves. Try it: "Hi. My name is Al, and I'm an e-mail forwarder." We'll start a group and call it Forwardaholics Anonymous.
   But isn't there something you can do about all those angle brackets? Surely there must be a way to strip them out of mail you want to save or print.
   And there is. It's actually easy. The magic symbol stripper is a small program that you run in your Web browser. It works on Windows PCs, Apple's older Macintoshes, Apple's new OS X computers and most modern Linux PCs. All you need is a modern Web browser that runs JavaScript. Nearly all of them do.
   The program is called "Mr. Ed's E-mail Bracket Stripper." (Yes, I know it sounds like an old TV show, but you'll like this a lot more than you liked the talking horse.) You can run the program by going to Mr. Ed's Web site or you can download the program and run it right from your own computer. (Running it off the Web means you can access the program even when you're visiting -- shudder! your sister-in-law, the one who sends you all those forwarded e-mails -- but otherwise you'll surely want to run it off your own computer.)
   Here's the site: www.geocities.com/cj1alt/stripper.html. All the instructions you'll ever need are right there. You can even choose to strip out more than just the bracket characters.
   The basic idea of Mr. Ed's program is simplicimo basico. (OK, I made up that last term. But I like the way it sounds, and you're free to abscond with it.) You copy the entire text of the e-mail message you want to clean, then you paste it into Mr. Ed's program. (To copy something, drag your mouse over it with the button held down, then press Ctrl-C in Windows or Command-C on an Apple computer. To paste it, press Ctrl-V on a Windows PC or Command-V on an Apple computer.)
   Click a button on your screen and the text should appear in the output Window cleaned of all those weirdo characters. (No jokes, please. We all know a few weirdo characters, but the ones I'm referring to are on your screen.) You can then copy and paste the de-weirdo-ized text into your mail program to replace the original. (Tip: You can leave the original text selected. When you paste the fixed-up text back into the mail window, the pasted text will replace the old selected text instantly.)
   Mr. Ed never tells who he is, but hidden in the program source is a note explaining that the original stripper program was written by Patrick Callanan. Mr. Ed modified it and made it available on his site.