These guidelines can also be found at:
http://www.rockbox.org/mail/etiquette.html
The list below are specific to the rockbox.org mailing lists. Where
they differ with respect to [1]RFC1855, these points override those
in RFC1855:
Violating these guidelines will make people ignore your posts and
possibly get you kicked off the list.
1. Subscription requirements.
2. Sending a new message to the list.
3. Replying to a message from the list.
4. Sensible subjects.
5. Searching the archives, the web and the wiki
6. Automatic replies.
7. Credits and further reading
1. Subscription requirements.
Recently, we have had to impose a restriction on the mailing
lists. You must be subscribed to the mailing list in order to
post messages to that mailing list. This is mainly due to the
massive amounts of spam we need to deal with somehow otherwise.
2. Sending a new message to the list.
DO NOT reply to an existing message as a short-cut to post a
message to the lists. Email is not a disjunct set of messages, but
is threaded, and mailing lists use this feature to provide a
coherent archive. Many email clients also group messages into a
thread. When ever you hit the "Reply" button, it adds information
to your outgoing email that tells the rest of the world that it is
a reply to that message.
3. Replying to a message from the list.
When you do reply to a message someone else has posted, please use
the "Group reply" or "Reply to all" button on your mailer.
Individual developers don't know everything, and by replying to
them personally, you effectively cut yourself off from all the
other people who could help you. Please ensure that you reply to
the list and the sender of the message.
If you are including the original message in your reply, always
edit the message such that it only quotes the sections which are
relevant to your reply. Don't just quote the whole of the message
to which you're replying.
Also, please use a mail client which correctly includes
References: and/or In-Reply-To: headers in email replies. These
headers are what keeps threads together by indicating precisely
which messages you are replying to, and the absence of them
obfuscates the mailing list by making your reply appear to start a
new thread of its own rather than being correctly associated with
the message to which you replied. Some mail clients, in particular
some configurations of Microsoft Outlook, are not
standards-compliant and do not conform to the recommendations of
[4]RFC 2822. In the case of Outlook you may be able to work around
the bug by switching to its 'Internet Email' mode.
If you reply to a message, don't use top-posting. Top-posting is
when you write the new text at the top of a mail and you insert
the previous quoted mail conversation below.
This is why top posting is so bad:
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read
text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
All this is pretty straight forward, and can be found in
[1]RFC1855 - Netiquette Guidelines.
4. Sensible subjects.
By phrasing a correct and descriptive subject of your mail, you
increase the chances of it being read by persons who you address.
This is particularly important for the people who subscribe to a
mailing list in digest mode since then the subject of the mail a
user replies to is by default always unsuitable for sending.
5. Searching the archives, the web and the wiki
Please search the mailing list archives before posting a technical
question or a problem to the mailing lists. It is highly possible
that your question has already been asked before, or someone else
has encountered your problem and a solution has already been aired
on the lists.
6. Automatic replies.
We don't need to know that you're out of office. If you enable an
autoresponder, do it in such a way that it doesn't respond to
mailing list messages. Failure to do so will get you unsubscribed
from the list.
7. Credits and further reading.
Parts of these etiquette guidelines come from Russell King's guide
from the linux-arm-kernel mailing list.
[2]"How To Ask Questions The Smart Way"
[3]"How do I quote correctly in Usenet"
References:
[1] = http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1855.html
[2] = http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
[3] = http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html
[4] = http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2822.html
