Mailing List Etiquette

Det mailtodet at dets-home.de
Tue Dec 4 09:55:05 GMT 2007


Ok folks,

after joking and fooling around a bit (what in every community sometimes
simply must be) I feel obliged to give a short reply to this more serious
stuff too, hoping also that the future will bring more on-topic stuff
(twinkling to Cory).

Larry Lines wrote:
> But some people do the normal mailing list post at the end.
[...]
> For those of you who don't know mailing list etiquette, if you are
> replying to a post, go to the end of the email and add your text to the
> end of the email.

It is indeed not only top-posting or bottom-posting, so "going to
the end" is not enough.
The principle is:  trim the quote to the statements you
want to respond to, then answer inline!

I strongly second this critics, as I receive this mailing list as a digest
and it is very annoying to read the ONE resulting mail if the noise
ratio is too big.

As being member of many lists since years, and having been adminstrator
and moderator on some too, I consider it indeed a serious topic to be
recognised by writers, especially in a list which has the chance to
become a high traffic list, like this one.

> I looked for a general etiquette for Linux mailing lists faq or something
> on google, but basically each mailing list has its own etiquette and
> usually you can find those rules somewhere.

That leads to the impression there may be no "general etiquette",
but that is wrong.

The term for this is 'Netiquette'  (Net+Etiquette) and is as old as
computer networking is. It evolved already at Usenet times, before
WWW was even invented. Quoting is only part of it, there is much
more to learn (about behaviour, sending HTML-Mails a.s.o.) .
But quoting is one of the most important things.

Since 1995 those rules are even formulated as "Request for Comment",
which is the form of specifications of the Internet Engineering Task Force.
(E.g. each technical protocol like tcp, ip, smtp, pop, http, ftp, irc
 a.s.o. are specificied in such RFCs).

Sorry, long post, here is the link :
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1855

KR
Det




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