For the impatient:
Patch for Pine 4.60, 4.61, 4.63, 4.64
Pine source
FAQ on patching pine

I use Pine as my email client, and I really like it. It’s fast, simple, full-featured, and very keyboardable. However, nothing’s perfect, even Pine.

This patch adds an option to Pine that removes trailing quotes from messages when you send them, or when you hit a keystroke. What’s a trailing quote, you ask? It’s best described by example. The last three lines in this email are a trailing quote:

On Fri, 4 Jun 2004, Jane Doe wrote:

> Thanks for the invite! Should I bring anything?

No, I have everything I need. Thanks though!

> I'll see you soon...
>
> -Jane

I wrote this patch to make it easier to observe proper netiquette when quoting. If you want to quote the smallest relevant piece of an email, you often need to delete a significant amount of quoted text. This is especially true if you correspond with people who top-post. (ick!) This patch automates the drudgery of trimming that excess quoted text.

For more on the top- vs. bottom-post debate, see: http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/T/top-post.html http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/usenet/brox.html

Also, a few recent email clients, such as GMail, try to use quoted text to do smart things. This patch can make your emails more readable in those clients. (I’ve discussed my thoughts on gmail vs pine at length.)

Feel free to email me with feedback or bug reports.

Known bug: Whole quotes are not detected correctly if you start your email with (C)ompose instead of (R)eply. This is usually encountered when you reply to an email, postpone the reply, then resume and attempt to send.