Emails can be difficult to read due to full quotes or long signatures. If you use a text-based mail client and want to process messages in a more efficient way, you are in luck: This article looks at the t-prot tool [1], which helps you focus on the essentials in emails.

T-prot stands for "TOFU Protection." TOFU [2] refers to the citation style used in emails where the newly written text appears at the beginning of an email, and the rest of the email, including all the signatures, is sent as a quote: text at the top, full quote at the bottom. This type of message structure often results in excessively long and difficult-to-understand emails. T-prot's goal is to automatically filter this kind of content and improve the readability of text emails. Originally developed for Unix-style systems, the tool, which was written in Perl, is often used in combination with text-based mail clients such as NeoMutt [3].

What t-prot Does

One of t-prot's main features is to reduce, hide, or completely remove superfluous quotes, text repetitions, and other text elements that disrupt the flow of a message. This makes the actual message far clearer, especially in long email exchanges. You can define the extent to which the tool changes the content of an email yourself using a variety of configuration options.

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