There are many, many free search and replace programs, written for
dos or dos boxes in windows, that can easily strip these characters.
Some like gsr.exe and gsar.exe replace one ``string'' of characters
with another, or with nothing. Their disadvantage is they will also
strip > or >> at the middle or end of a line such marks may be
meaningful, such as in an arithmetic statement (e.g., 4 > 2).
Other search and replace programs such as sed, awk, or perl, allow
you to strip these characters, only if they occur at the beginning of
a line. For instance, using yarn's ability to pipe a message through
a program, the (sed) command:
|sed "s/^>//" <ENTER>
will strip all > symbols at the beginning of a line from a message.
A third possibility is one of the many ``power editors'' such as elvis
, vim, or winvi (vi for windows) that have a search and replace command
which uses so called ``regular expressions''. If you use one of these
programs as you replies editor, you can easily strip these characters with
one keystroke, by defining a suitable macro.
All of the previous kinds of programs, with the possible exception of perl
can be found at Rich Green's site, Freeware for DOS, not Windows:
http://geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/1401/softlib1.htm
A final possibility: Many mail/news programs and transport programs
have a ``translation facility'' (for instance, Eudora), usually designed
to convert one character into another, when a file is transported to or
from your Internet Provider. You can use these translation filters to
replace the offending characters by, for instance a space or a tab.
In sum, there are many ways to do what you want. The question is which
is most convenient for you, depending on your hardware/software,
particular needs, etc.