On Wednesday, 22 June 2022 at 15:41:39 -0400, grarpamp wrote: > Around 6/2x/22, Many <peo...@where.ever> rammed their horribly formed > msgs upon others to parse: > ... > FreeBSD needs to add an entire section on the > email post formatting netiquette to the Handbook, > and link it on the List Subscription pages, and in the List Welcome > emails, and even in quarterly automated administrivia post to all lists.
In fact we have guidelines, just not exactly where you might expect. "How to get Best Results from the FreeBSD-questions Mailing List" (https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/freebsd-questions/) contains: Unless there is a good reason to do otherwise, reply to the sender and to FreeBSD-questions. Include relevant text from the original message. Trim it to the minimum, but do not overdo it. It should still be possible for somebody who did not read the original message to understand what you are talking about. Use some technique to identify which text came from the original message, and which text you add. I personally find that prepending â>â to the original message works best. Leaving white space after the â> ;â and leave empty lines between your text and the original text both make the result more readable. Put your response in the correct place (after the text to which it replies). It is very difficult to read a thread of responses where each reply comes before the text to which it replies. Most mailers change the subject line on a reply by prepending a text such as "Re: ". If your mailer does not do it automatically, you should do it manually. If the submitter did not abide by format conventions (lines too long, inappropriate subject line) please fix it. In the case of an incorrect subject line (such as "HELP!!??"), change the subject line to (say) "Re: Difficulties with sync PPP (was: HELP!!??)". That way other people trying to follow the thread will have less difficulty following it. In such cases, it is appropriate to say what you did and why you did it, but try not to be rude. If you find you can not answer without being rude, do not answer. Arguably these recommendations should be separated out into their own page. Re-reading them, I see that there is no explicit line length recommendation. That should be included. And yes, I agree entirely with your concerns, though without my core hat. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA.php
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
