Matthias Kirschner wrote: > - *E-Mail signature* Keep it small and simple. Signatures longer > than five lines should be avoided.
IIRC in the good old days the standard was maximum 4 lines (5 lines with the "-- " sig separator). > - *Mailinglists* Use list-reply. It is not necessary to include the > sender in To: or Cc: if he is subscribed. If the e-mail programs > are configured correct the sender will be Cc’ed if he is not > subscribed or wishes to be Cc’ed. Hmm. This is certainly debatable. On GNU and GNOME mailing lists (and I dare to say, on *most* free software lists) the default policy is to always to CC people who participated in the thread. This is fairly logical: Scenario 1) I am a user who discovered a bug in GNU Foo, and post to [email protected]. I should not be required to subscribe, and I should not be required to dig eventual followups via inconvenient interfaces like Mailman's archives, or -- heaven forbid -- something like the various/nefarious mail archiving sites like nabble.com. I should get the response right away. Scenario 2) I'm a regular lurker on the bug-foo list, thus I'm subscribed. A user reports a bug/misfeature, or is confused about something in the `foo' package, so I reply to him. It is not feasible to check whether the user is subscribed, even if I happen to be the list admin. I just CC her, to be on the safe side and save her extra trouble. Scenario 3) I happen to develop gnome-foo and need to announce a string change to gnome-i18n during a string freeze. I'm not a translator myself, and I'm not subscribed to that list. I post the announcement, but a translator then asks a question about the new (cryptic) string, which I don't receive. Scenario 4) I'm subscribed to many lists, but I don't read regularly all of them. However, if I participate in a discussion on some of those "low interest" lists, I appreciate if a person who posts to the thread CCs me. I know this is not very usual situation, but the more mail I'm processing as years go by, the more I appreciate it. Scenario N) There are plenty. Really. From all the lists I'm subscribed to (much more than 200, actually), TTBOMK only Debian has a strict no-CC policy. I comply, of course, although I notice that many DDs don't bother. (The extra mental excercise to determine where you're posting to is also slightly annoying.) In general, it seems to me that a no-CC policy is very inter-community friendly (you sort your mail easily, and you rely people to CC you when you ask), but basically user-unfriendly -- it is very presumptuous to rely that the OP is going to search and watch for your-almighty-followup just because you happen to have an odd list policy. More generally speaking, mailing lists are a gross hack to replace Usenet newsgroups, just because the new kids on the block seem to find NNTP archaic and weird (partly because most "modern" user-agents have from moderate to poor NNTP support). Thus the always-CC vs. no-CC debate. YMMV. _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list [email protected] https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
