Please follow all of these guidelines to ensure that the list members can read your message. It is worth applying these to your other mails as well. Netiquette was established many years ago for many good reasons. Understanding them will ensure a more pleasant mailing list and newsgroup experience as you traverse the Internet.
If your message is more difficult to read than it needs to be, many list members will simply delete it. Make sure that your MUA is configured to send your message as plain-text, not HTML, multipart/alternative, quoted-printable (sometimes called quoted-unreadable for good reason), base64, or some other encoding. HTML mail is rejected. If you don't know how to configure your MUA to not send HTML in messages, http://www.expita.com/nomime.html has instructions for configuring many common MUAs. Don't type your message in all-caps; it makes you appear to be shouting, and is considered rude. Include relevant information in the body of your message. Don't assume that putting it in the Subject: header field is sufficient. Don't include MIME attachments. Configure your MUA to wrap lines at 72 characters or so; long lines make for unreadable messages in some clients. Also make sure that your MUA doesn't automatically send useless attachments (vcards and such) with every message; it's a waste of bandwidth. Limit your signatures to Three lines. If you need to supply a large amount of information to explain your problem clearly (i.e., you want the list to see several hundred lines of log entries), put the information on a website and include the URL in your message instead of sending it as an attachment. Make sure your message is in clear, concise, and correct English. If English is not your first language, that's fine. The members of the list will do their best to understand your message. However, if your message is unclear simply because you cannot be bothered to ensure that it is free of gross spelling or grammatical errors, it may be ignored completely. To be more explicit: do not use any of the following in your message: Lanugages other than English Abbreviations - Use the formal full spelling in the first usage, if you must abbreviate Misspellings (including "leet"-speak and other abominations of English) Lack of punctuation or capitalization Incorrect punctuation or capitalization If you post a followup message (replying to someone else's request for clarification or additional information, or answering specific questions), please do so sensibly: Quote only what is necessary. Trim everything else. Attribute quotes properly. Post new material underneath older material. Don't top-post! This bears repeating: Do not top-post in your replies to the mailing list! Do not top-post in your replies to the mailing list! Do not top-post in your replies to the mailing list! Top-posting makes the list archives un-readable. Top-posting to a mailing list is like dumping excrement in our homes; if you do it, you'll likely not be happy with the response. Some MUAs, such as Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Outlook Express, encourage top-posting by their default configuration, or even make it needlessly difficult to quote correctly. If you use one of these broken MUAs and must continue to use it, the following free add-ons can apparently fix them for you: Outlook Express: http://home.in.tum.de/~jain/software/oe-quotefix/ Outlook: http://home.in.tum.de/~jain/software/outlook-quotefix/ If you don't know what top-posting is, or don't already understand common Usenet and mailing list etiquette, please read the following documents which explain proper quoting style: http://www.uwasa.fi/~ts/http/quote.html http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/usenet/brox.html http://www.xs4all.nl/%7ewijnands/nnq/nquote.html http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote2.html http://homepage.ntlworld.com/g.mccaughan/g/remarks/uquote.html List-admin - Chaos Solutions L.C. -- Only a fool has no doubts. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
