MAIL-ETIQUETTE 12 KB

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  6. MAIL ETIQUETTE
  7. 1. About the lists
  8. 1.1 Mailing Lists
  9. 1.2 Netiquette
  10. 1.3 Do Not Mail a Single Individual
  11. 1.4 Subscription Required
  12. 1.5 Moderation of new posters
  13. 1.6 Handling trolls and spam
  14. 1.7 How to unsubscribe
  15. 1.8 I posted, now what?
  16. 1.9 Your emails are public
  17. 2. Sending mail
  18. 2.1 Reply or New Mail
  19. 2.2 Reply to the List
  20. 2.3 Use a Sensible Subject
  21. 2.4 Do Not Top-Post
  22. 2.5 HTML is not for mails
  23. 2.6 Quoting
  24. 2.7 Digest
  25. 2.8 Please Tell Us How You Solved The Problem
  26. ==============================================================================
  27. 1. About the lists
  28. 1.1 Mailing Lists
  29. The mailing lists we have are all listed and described at
  30. https://curl.se/mail/
  31. Each mailing list is targeted to a specific set of users and subjects,
  32. please use the one or the ones that suit you the most.
  33. Each mailing list has hundreds up to thousands of readers, meaning that each
  34. mail sent will be received and read by a large number of people. People
  35. from various cultures, regions, religions and continents.
  36. 1.2 Netiquette
  37. Netiquette is a common term for how to behave on the Internet. Of course, in
  38. each particular group and subculture there will be differences in what is
  39. acceptable and what is considered good manners.
  40. This document outlines what we in the curl project consider to be good
  41. etiquette, and primarily this focus on how to behave on and how to use our
  42. mailing lists.
  43. 1.3 Do Not Mail a Single Individual
  44. Many people send one question to one person. One person gets many mails, and
  45. there is only one person who can give you a reply. The question may be
  46. something that other people would also like to ask. These other people have
  47. no way to read the reply, but to ask the one person the question. The one
  48. person consequently gets overloaded with mail.
  49. If you really want to contact an individual and perhaps pay for his or her
  50. services, by all means go ahead, but if it's just another curl question,
  51. take it to a suitable list instead.
  52. 1.4 Subscription Required
  53. All curl mailing lists require that you are subscribed to allow a mail to go
  54. through to all the subscribers.
  55. If you post without being subscribed (or from a different mail address than
  56. the one you are subscribed with), your mail will simply be silently
  57. discarded. You have to subscribe first, then post.
  58. The reason for this unfortunate and strict subscription policy is of course
  59. to stop spam from pestering the lists.
  60. 1.5 Moderation of new posters
  61. Several of the curl mailing lists automatically make all posts from new
  62. subscribers be moderated. This means that after you have subscribed and
  63. sent your first mail to a list, that mail will not be let through to the
  64. list until a mailing list administrator has verified that it is OK and
  65. permits it to get posted.
  66. Once a first post has been made that proves the sender is actually talking
  67. about curl-related subjects, the moderation "flag" will be switched off and
  68. future posts will go through without being moderated.
  69. The reason for this moderation policy is that we do suffer from spammers who
  70. actually subscribe and send spam to our lists.
  71. 1.6 Handling trolls and spam
  72. Despite our good intentions and hard work to keep spam off the lists and to
  73. maintain a friendly and positive atmosphere, there will be times when spam
  74. and or trolls get through.
  75. Troll - "someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages
  76. in an online community"
  77. Spam - "use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk
  78. messages"
  79. No matter what, we NEVER EVER respond to trolls or spammers on the list. If
  80. you believe the list admin should do something in particular, contact them
  81. off-list. The subject will be taken care of as much as possible to prevent
  82. repeated offenses, but responding on the list to such messages never leads to
  83. anything good and only puts the light even more on the offender: which was
  84. the entire purpose of it getting sent to the list in the first place.
  85. Do not feed the trolls.
  86. 1.7 How to unsubscribe
  87. You can unsubscribe the same way you subscribed in the first place. You go
  88. to the page for the particular mailing list you are subscribed to and you enter
  89. your email address and password and press the unsubscribe button.
  90. Also, the instructions to unsubscribe are included in the headers of every
  91. mail that is sent out to all curl related mailing lists and there's a footer
  92. in each mail that links to the "admin" page on which you can unsubscribe and
  93. change other options.
  94. You NEVER EVER email the mailing list requesting someone else to take you off
  95. the list.
  96. 1.8 I posted, now what?
  97. If you are not subscribed with the same email address that you used to send
  98. the email, your post will just be silently discarded.
  99. If you posted for the first time to the mailing list, you first need to wait
  100. for an administrator to allow your email to go through (moderated). This
  101. normally happens quickly but in case we are asleep, you may have to wait a
  102. few hours.
  103. Once your email goes through it is sent out to several hundred or even
  104. thousands of recipients. Your email may cover an area that not that many
  105. people know about or are interested in. Or possibly the person who knows
  106. about it is on vacation or under a heavy work load right now. You may have
  107. to wait for a response and you should not expect to get a response at all.
  108. Ideally, you get an answer within a couple of days.
  109. You do yourself and all of us a service when you include as many details as
  110. possible already in your first email. Mention your operating system and
  111. environment. Tell us which curl version you are using and tell us what you
  112. did, what happened and what you expected would happen. Preferably, show us
  113. what you did with details enough to allow others to help point out the
  114. problem or repeat the steps in their locations.
  115. Failing to include details will only delay responses and make people respond
  116. and ask for more details and you will have to send a follow-up email that
  117. includes them.
  118. Expect the responses to primarily help YOU debug the issue, or ask YOU
  119. questions that can lead you or others towards a solution or explanation to
  120. whatever you experience.
  121. If you are a repeat offender to the guidelines outlined in this document,
  122. chances are that people will ignore you at will and your chances to get
  123. responses in the future will greatly diminish.
  124. 1.9 Your emails are public
  125. Your email, its contents and all its headers and the details in those
  126. headers will be received by every subscriber of the mailing list that you
  127. send your email to.
  128. Your email as sent to a curl mailing list will end up in mail archives, on
  129. the curl website and elsewhere, for others to see and read. Today and in
  130. the future. In addition to the archives, the mail is sent out to thousands
  131. of individuals. There is no way to undo a sent email.
  132. When sending emails to a curl mailing list, do not include sensitive
  133. information such as user names and passwords; use fake ones, temporary ones
  134. or just remove them completely from the mail. Note that this includes base64
  135. encoded HTTP Basic auth headers.
  136. This public nature of the curl mailing lists makes automatically inserted mail
  137. footers about mails being "private" or "only meant for the recipient" or
  138. similar even more silly than usual. Because they are absolutely not private
  139. when sent to a public mailing list.
  140. 2. Sending mail
  141. 2.1 Reply or New Mail
  142. Please do not reply to an existing message as a short-cut to post a message
  143. to the lists.
  144. Many mail programs and web archivers use information within mails to keep
  145. them together as "threads", as collections of posts that discuss a certain
  146. subject. If you do not intend to reply on the same or similar subject, do not
  147. just hit reply on an existing mail and change the subject, create a new mail.
  148. 2.2 Reply to the List
  149. When replying to a message from the list, make sure that you do "group
  150. reply" or "reply to all", and not just reply to the author of the single
  151. mail you reply to.
  152. We are actively discouraging replying back to the single person by setting
  153. the Reply-To: field in outgoing mails back to the mailing list address,
  154. making it harder for people to mail the author directly, if only by mistake.
  155. 2.3 Use a Sensible Subject
  156. Please use a subject of the mail that makes sense and that is related to the
  157. contents of your mail. It makes it a lot easier to find your mail afterwards
  158. and it makes it easier to track mail threads and topics.
  159. 2.4 Do Not Top-Post
  160. If you reply to a message, do not use top-posting. Top-posting is when you
  161. write the new text at the top of a mail and you insert the previous quoted
  162. mail conversation below. It forces users to read the mail in a backwards
  163. order to properly understand it.
  164. This is why top posting is so bad (in top posting order):
  165. A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
  166. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
  167. A: Top-posting.
  168. Q: What is the most annoying thing in email?
  169. Apart from the screwed up read order (especially when mixed together in a
  170. thread when someone responds using the mandated bottom-posting style), it
  171. also makes it impossible to quote only parts of the original mail.
  172. When you reply to a mail. You let the mail client insert the previous mail
  173. quoted. Then you put the cursor on the first line of the mail and you move
  174. down through the mail, deleting all parts of the quotes that do not add
  175. context for your comments. When you want to add a comment you do so, inline,
  176. right after the quotes that relate to your comment. Then you continue
  177. downwards again.
  178. When most of the quotes have been removed and you have added your own words,
  179. you are done.
  180. 2.5 HTML is not for mails
  181. Please switch off those HTML encoded messages. You can mail all those funny
  182. mails to your friends. We speak plain text mails.
  183. 2.6 Quoting
  184. Quote as little as possible. Just enough to provide the context you cannot
  185. leave out. A lengthy description can be found here:
  186. https://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html
  187. 2.7 Digest
  188. We allow subscribers to subscribe to the "digest" version of the mailing
  189. lists. A digest is a collection of mails lumped together in one single mail.
  190. Should you decide to reply to a mail sent out as a digest, there are two
  191. things you MUST consider if you really really cannot subscribe normally
  192. instead:
  193. Cut off all mails and chatter that is not related to the mail you want to
  194. reply to.
  195. Change the subject name to something sensible and related to the subject,
  196. preferably even the actual subject of the single mail you wanted to reply to
  197. 2.8 Please Tell Us How You Solved The Problem
  198. Many people mail questions to the list, people spend some of their time and
  199. make an effort in providing good answers to these questions.
  200. If you are the one who asks, please consider responding once more in case
  201. one of the hints was what solved your problems. The guys who write answers
  202. feel good to know that they provided a good answer and that you fixed the
  203. problem. Far too often, the person who asked the question is never heard from
  204. again, and we never get to know if they are gone because the problem was
  205. solved or perhaps because the problem was unsolvable.
  206. Getting the solution posted also helps other users that experience the same
  207. problem(s). They get to see (possibly in the web archives) that the
  208. suggested fixes actually have helped at least one person.