List etiquette
- List
etiquette
- Further
reading
Please observe these do's and dont's of mailing list
etiquette. It will make everyone's life easier, including
yours. These simple rules are not only for mailing lists and
usenet, but also for private email as well.
These are not rules someone dreamed up one day. This is
expected, matured, and evolved behaviour. Composing your
messages in a sane fashion will benefit all by making your
messages easy to follow.
| DON'T |
post messages in HTML, HTML is for
web pages not email. |
| DON'T |
post anything using MIME or
multipart "features". Not everyone uses the same email
client or has the same setup as you. |
| DON'T |
attach 20-line ASCII-art signatures
to the bottom of every message. Make sure you use
sigdashes and have a signature that is four (4) lines or
less. Sigdashes are "-- ", regexp:
'^-- $'. That's dash, dash, space, then a
newline. Sigdashes are not "--", or
"----" or a bunch of *'s or _'s. |
| DO |
use common sense when citing the
previous message. Edit your replies! |
| DON'T |
cite the whole of the previous
message just because that's your mailer's default
behaviour. And especially, don't cite all of the junk
that the previous poster forgot to trim. Edit your
replies! Edit your replies! Edit your replies! Edit your
replies! |
| DON'T |
post new messages by using your
mailer's "reply" feature to reply to some random message,
unless you're going to manually remove the In-Reply-To:
and References: headers. Mail readers use these headers
for threading, so don't put them where they don't
belong. |
| DO |
post replies using your mailer's
"reply" feature. This way, other people can see if a
message has been replied to without having to scan the
rest of the list, and it doesn't break the threading.
Breaking threads make it difficult, if not impossible to
follow. |
| DO |
line-wrap natural-language text to
around 70 to 75 columns (to allow some space for citation
marks). Don't assume that everybody else's mailer will do
it automatically just because yours does. |
$Revision: 1.1 $
$Date: 2001/10/07 05:35:50 $
|
Help
· Help & Docs
|