David Desrosiers wrote:
Unless something has changed *VERY* recently with Mailman, that is
most-definitely not the case. Bcc'd replies are frowned upon, and mailing
lists generally do not resort to using them.
You know how it takes someone to point something out for you to realise
that you knew it already? Thanks for correcting me. I'm thinking back a
*long* way to the DOS-based mailing list management software I used to use.
[SNIP]
Nothing hurts worse than seeing a 52k email come through on a PDA or
cellphone with a 1 sentence reply sitting at the bottom of 100 scrolled
pages of useless previous banter.
PDA/phone use - now there's something I should have mentioned. Thanks again.
[SNIP]
Similarly you should be careful about editing someone-else's words
that you're quoting - but its generally OK to reformat it if
necessary. If it makes sense to paraphrase what someone said
rather than quote it directly, then do so
I see this quite a bit on the Project Gutenberg and Wikipedia lists that
I'm on, where they are VERY high traffic lists, and people are misquoted
all the time in the confusing shuffle of inter/overlapping threads.
It's a good point that what is required to give context varies from list
to list. I am assuming that none of the people here who have anything to
learn on this subject subscribe to high traffic lists - without
exception I would expect them to very quickly point out any perceived
errors in the ways people post.
[SNIP]
Communication is a two-way street. You need to make sure you are saying
what you intend other people to hear, AND you need to make sure your words
are conveyed in a point that the listener can easily understand. Just
because you speak perfectly-articulated Spanish, doesn't mean your German
audience will understand you. Likewise with technical jargon and other
things. Talk at the level of your audience, not down to them.
All agreed, but my point still stands: don't get hung up about it - at
least not here. I'd much rather see people getting involved than feeling
they daren't because they're not sure of the rules or because they think
their grammar is no good.
On heavy traffic lists, I'd guess that 90% of subscribers only ready 10%
(or much less) of what is written, and it gets very easy when you have
hundreds or thousands of unread messages to skip anything which isn't
easy to read.
[SNIP]
The general and accepted rule, is 3 lines of .signature, total. 4 is
probably acceptable, but 8 or some large ascii animation, is not.
Ideally under 4 lines, prefixed by a signature separator (a line
containing only dash-dash-space) for the benefit of mail clients which
can auto-strip quotes. Although on a list like this which adds four
lines of its own it seems silly to preach limits.
Another general rule: disclaimers are worthless and generally give a
poor impression of the person sending them. They usually say something
to the effect that "we're in the habit of sending confidential material
to the wrong people, but if you receive it please don't read it as that
will save us fixing our problems". Or at least that's how I interpret them.
[...]
Another point to mention: Keep the HTML on port 80 and the SMTP on port 25
please.
I thought hard about how hard to push this one. A lot of mail clients
make this hard to get right, and if (as I would like to believe) this
list is suitable for mailing list "learners" then the principle of
keeping it clean and not including attachments etc seemed more important
than getting into the issue of HTML (or RTF, for that matter). But
instinctively from a personal point of view I 100% agree with you.
If this became a problem I'm pretty sure it could be filtered server-side.
[...]
Overall, these are good points above. There are quite a few other
resources on Teh Intarweb to facilitate learning even more about email
ettiquette. I'd suggest searching them out and reading them.
Thanks for the feedback!
Emily Postnews was always one of my preferred references to point people
at, although it may be a bit dated now. A Google will find it for those
who haven't seen it.
--
Mark Rogers
More Solutions Ltd :: 0845 45 89 555
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