So… WordPress rolled out this cool new feature, ‘Comment Reply Via Email’, a week ago, right? Whenever someone posts a comment on your blog, WordPress sends you an email notification, and, instead of clicking on a reply link within the email to fire up the browser (like how it was done before), you can now hit “Reply” in your e-mail client and send off a reply email that WordPress will parse and post as a comment made by you on your blog.

All in all, pretty neat, and a great time-saver. Except when I tried out the feature for the first time just a while ago, WordPress happily went and included my email signature—containing my real name, address and cell phone number—as part of my reply, details I definitely do not want published on my blog.

That’s not so cool, since I now have to manually delete the signature that my email client automatically inserts into every new composition every time I reply to a comment. Maybe the folks at WordPress should consider configuring their servers to recognize the -- that typically precedes a signature as the end of the text in a comment reply. This way, users get the option of whether their signatures get included or not simply by tweaking their signatures accordingly.

So, for all of you intending to use this feature, remember to delete in your reply email all that you don’t wish to be included as part of your comment reply. Quoted text in the reply email is automatically ignored, however, so you don’t have to fret about having to delete that whole chunk of quoted text.

Update 14.05.09

‘Comment Reply Via Email’ is supposed to automatically parse out signature blocks just like the new ‘Post by Email‘ feature. Matt Mullenweg responded to my post in the comment threads on that page, advising that there is a bug that is preventing this from working correctly.

Thank you, Matt.