[Babase] List netiquette

Karl O. Pinc babase@www.eco.princeton.edu
Tue, 12 Apr 2005 02:54:59 +0000


On 04/11/2005 04:14:36 PM, Catherine Markham wrote:

A reminder for all.  Those who wonder whether
it really matters at all should read the brief article
linked to at the bottom.

---

If you don't send plain text then I can't auto-quote
your mail in my reply and must cut and paste.
(It looks like this reply, where Catherine wrote: nothing.)  And
it's kinda barfy in the list archives to send html, pdf,
and doc formats, any of them.

I'm trying to get Axel
to make our archives to search able, but he's been out
of town.  The archives will be much more useful if
they are easily searched, but not when they're full
of cruft.

As long as I'm on the topic, good netiquette on the part
of all mailing list participants
helps greatly when going though an archive.  That
would be: quoting only enough of the email to which you're
responding that the reader is able to follow
the thread.  Generally this means embedding your
reply into the midst of the relevant quoted parts.
(It also aids the reader in that he
does not have to read through pages of who wrote
what to see what's being responded to.)

Grump, grump, grump.  They just don't write email
like they used to back when we had 300baud modems....

>From RFC 1855
ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc1855.txt

    - Be brief without being overly terse.  When replying to a message,
      include enough original material to be understood but no more. It
      is extremely bad form to simply reply to a message by including
      all the previous message: edit out all the irrelevant material.

    - Mail should have a subject heading which reflects
      the content of the message.
See also (really, it's good):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-posting
So, I can't really do anything about the way you guys
reply to email but sometimes I do feel like I'm in the
middle of a bunch of people who are eating
peas with their knife and, like a snob anywhere,
I just can't resist pointing out how my manners
are better than everybody else's.
Your loyal servant ever faithful in things compute-oid,
Karl <kop@meme.com>
Free Software:  "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
                 -- Robert A. Heinlein