Please familiarise yourself with the list's methods of managing your subscription. Mailing lists are operated by computer software. Some mailing lists require that you unsubscribe by sending commands (in the software's limited vocabulary) by email, while others offer a web-based interface for these commands. (Yahoo! Groups offers both.) When subscribing, you should have received a "welcome letter" explaining how to unsubscribe or change other subscription settings. Do not post to the list address asking to be unsubscribed, as the other subscribers cannot do this for you. When interacting with the list software, be sure to use the same address that you are subscribed with, or the software may not recognise you. As a last resort, you can ask the list's moderator or administrator for help, but it is generally better to let the machines do the housework!
If forwarding someone else's reporting or opinions, please name the sources. Do not spread chains of anonymous rumours. Be mindful that many media sources and well-known individuals enforce strict copyright terms on their creations. If you are forward copyright material without permission, be prepared for the consequences.
Be extremely wary when cross-posting to more than one mailing list or to a combination of lists and individuals, or when replying to cross-posts. Recipients may accidentally reply to all addresses found in the headers. In most cases this is not appropriate. You should never expose other people's private email addresses, and this is especially dangerous and intrusive when posting addresses to mailing lists. You can hide people's addresses using the "Bcc:" ("Blind Carbon Copy") header available in most email clients, or by sending the material in a separate email to each recipient.
Do not make assumptions about others based on their address, affiliation, software or written language skills. While English is the dominant language on the internet, not everybody speaks it as their first language.
Time, disk space and bandwidth (the amount of data that can be transported through a network at a given time) are finite and usually cost the users money. Do not use HTML or proprietary word-processing formats where plain text will do. These add unnecessary bloat to the size of a message and, if they do not follow commonly accepted standards, may not be readable by other people.
To give concrete examples, a 200 word piece of text takes up between 1 and 2 kilobytes. The equivalent in HTML (where formatting tags are added) could be between twice and four times as large. This all adds up! Even if your email software can read HTML, it will take longer to parse formatted text than plain. Word processors are worse as there is no official standard for the format of a word-processing file. A word-processed document may need to be converted to text (taking extra time) or may be completely inaccessible on a recipient's computer. You cannot assume that everyone on a mailing list uses the exact same hardware and software configuration that you do.
No MIME provides a thorough explanation of why HTML email is a bad idea, and instructions for configuring most popular email clients to send email as text.
If you wish to publish something other than text to a large group of people, do not send it to a mailing list. This would generate a copy of the attachment for each and every subscriber to the list, causing bottlenecks and delays in all of the networks between the sender and each recipient. Rather, make the file available from a public FTP server or Web site. If you don't have access to either of these, you may be able to find someone who is willing to share their web space with you. (Yahoo! Groups and other web-based mailing lists provide groups with shared space for this purpose.)
Do not reply to a message in public if the reply should be private. Such situations include "in-jokes" or references to old school friends, references that are meaningless to 99% of the subscribers. It is also generally advisable not to reply to the list if the sole content of the reply is "I agree!" or similar.
Pay attention to the headers of the message to which you are replying. Some mailing list programs interfere with messages to add a "Reply-To:" which causes replies to be sent to the list by default. (Yahoo! Groups does this.) If you are sending a private reply, you will probably have to delete the list address and replace it with the recipient's private email address. (Check the "From:" header.) On the other hand, some other mailing list packages do not add a "Reply-To:" header, meaning that replies go to the original poster by default. This sometimes causes replies to go private when they would have been more appropriate on the list, but this situation is generally not as embarrassing as the opposite.
Quoting previous messages: When replying, quote only the material to which you are directly responding and delete the rest -- we have the original copies, thank you! (If someone has lost their copy of the original post, they can check the list archive or ask the original poster for a copy.) Attribute to the person or people to whom you are responding. Use the standard "> " ("greater-than") symbol followed by a space to indicate quotes. All email clients recognise this convention, but some, such as Outlook Express and AOL, require the poster to change their default settings in order to post properly.
Always add a meaningful "Subject:" header to your message. If you are replying to a message received in digest form, please replace "Digest number xxx" with the original poster's subject text or something similar. If the content of the thread has drifted, give it a more appropriate subject, indicating the original. For example: "Subject: Cheese, was Re: bishops".
When starting a new thread, compose a new email "To:" the list address. Do not "Reply" to a message that has no relation to your thread! Some mail clients make use of the "References:" and "In-Reply-To:" headers that are added by replies, and get confused by this behaviour.
Date: 2006/07/26 22:21:39