E-mail trimming
===

Before I start, please forget my ignorance when it comes to MIME and basic mail structure.

I'm looking for a general way to tell the difference between the latest e-mail reply vs all of the extra replies which are stored in the text body. 

For example ThunderBird puts giant

 ------------------------ Forward -----------------------
                         
  or
 
------------------------ Reply  -----------------------

banners, but g-mail doesn't seem to. [I read this RFC](http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2387.txt) but it doesn't seem to cover what I want. I'm also looking for a way to remove signatures from e-mails but I'm assuming there is no standard when it comes to handling them.