Steven D'Aprano posted on Sun, 06 Nov 2011 03:23:41 +1100 as excerpted: > It is common sense really: before pressing Send, consider how your email > will appear to the recipient. Will it make sense? Can they understand > what you are responding to? Do they have to scroll through 20 pages of > quoted text to see your reply?
Agreed. =:^) It's additionally worth noting that to some extent this is all personal preference, personal preferences are just that, personal, and thus by definition can and do sometimes conflict, and there's no posting police that are going to enforce some posting law on you (well, as long as you don't post copyrighted attachments without permission, etc. =:^\ ). So if you want, you can break all sorts of posting rules and nobody's likely to stop you -- after all, if they can't stop the spammers, are they really going to stop you? But by the same token, it's worth noting that replies, and in a world with scoring/killfiles, even reading a post, are voluntary as well. While you /can/ be as obnoxious as you choose with your posts, if you want reasonable replies, you'll choose not to be, or you'll eventually simply find your posts being ignored (in the worst case because they're now unseen, as they kill-filtered you!) by the people most likely to give you the most useful answers! So the wise poster quickly learns what type of requests tend to come from the people that also tend to have the most useful answers, and posts and ultimately entire groups/lists will naturally tend to conform to the opinions/requests of those who generate the most useful replies. Fortunately for me, my replies apparently tend to the more useful side, so my opinions and requests tend to get honored a bit more than those of others might, even if it's only to please my arbitrariness and thus keep those useful posts coming! =:^/ But I do try to make the point that it's just my opinion, you don't have to agree, while equally making the corresponding point that it IS my opinion, and I don't HAVE to reply, either! Whose loss that would be, mine or yours, is of course also personal opinion. You may well decide that the value of my replies isn't worth what I ask, or indeed, that you'd rather not see my replies at all, and that too would be your right, the latter being what scores and kill-filtering are there for. I guess that's not /so/ arbitrary; in fact, it sounds downright pragmatic! =:^) -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
