Am I the only one who is annoyed to death by e-mails that contain >>>> on each line? These characters are an indicator that the e-mail message (usually a joke or “cute” story) has been forwarded from the last recipient to you. The greater the number of “>” characters, the more times it has been forwarded.

It is simple courtesy to remove these characters before sending the joke/story to your contacts but laziness seems to raise it’s ugly head and off goes the joke/story with another “>” added to each line. But wait, there is help for those of us who are too darn lazy to remove the characters manually — StripMail to the rescue.

StripMail is a free download from Dsoft that removes the pesky “>” characters, reformats broken sentences and also removes “|” characters if they get embedded in the text due to repeated forwarding.

Figure 1 shows a joke “before and after” StripMail did its work. Note that the joke had been forwarded four times.

The tools of the program are shown in Figure 2. The program suggests you open StripMail and minimize it before opening your e-mail browser — where it will be waiting for you to quickly remove the >>>> characters. As you read your e-mail and decide you want to send it on to someone else, highlight the entire message/joke (a handy shortcut is to Right Click anywhere in the body of the message, chose Select All) and copy to your Clipboard.

Then maximize StripMail and click on Paste. This puts the message in the StripMail window. Now you can either click on Do it all, sort of a one-step procedure wherein the program will strip out the offending “>” characters but also realign the broken sentences, place the repaired message back on your Clipboard and close the program. Or, you can click individually on Strip, Paragraph, Copy and Close.

Best of all, this gem of a program is absolutely free by going to and downloading it to your hard drive. Please join me to eliminate those pesky “>>>>>>”.