Not an all time great kludge, but an interesting one... here's how Thunderbird apparently tells the difference between a line that's been quoted in an email and a line that starts with a greater-than (>), at least in plain text:

"Truly" quoted lines:
>> 67%, I didn't want to mess up any calculations.  I'm also ignoring 0% 
>> totals right now.)

Lines with "artificially added greater-thans":
 >> ...
 >> Real quickly -- also had a few street type entries I wanted to check up

That's right -- a line beginning with a ">" that was typed, not added through pasting a quote, has an extra space at the front when saved in Thunderbird. Hrm. Now that's a kludge -- you have to know to remove it when you send the email out, right? But afaict, Thunderbird doesn't. Lines where you add a ">" by typing it at the start of the line get that extra space on your recipient's side as well. So not a good kludge. ;^)

This is actually one of the issues I've been thinking about a fair amount lately -- eventually with any app you have to drop idealogical perfection, right? Is it realistically possible to create "perfect" code in the real-world? Is this, in part, why Comp Sci majors do so little that resembles real-world code in their undergraduate studies? I always want to do things right, with well factored code, interfaces, and generic implementations, but eventually the right solution for some problems has seemed to me to be a documented, well-thought-out kludge. Thunderbird apparently thought kludges are okay -- so much so that their app even seems to mangle some plain text emails to preserve a concept. I don't agree with that, but would like to see an app past undergrad CompSci (and even then I bet in places it's tough to find) that is kludgeless.