On Thu, 21 Oct 2010 17:28:20 +0200, Tassilo Horn <tassilo@member.fsf.org> wrote:
> 
> Charles Philip Chan <cpchan@sympatico.ca> writes:
> 
> Hi Charles and Nick,
> 
> >> How does footnote.el find the signature?
> >
> > I presume by looking for the line "--" which precedes the signature.
> 
> That's not completely true.  The line has to be "-- ", i.e. "--"
> followed by exactly one space.
> 
> Bye,
> Tassilo

indeed. looking at the code in footnode.el, there is a search for the
message-signature-separator, which defaults to "^-- $" to find where
to insert footnotes.