Hello Johannes, Firstly, others have written helpful and correct responses, please follow these suggestions. Those replies also look perfect and are easy to follow in my personal mail client (which is Outlook).
For the record, there are members of this community that couldn't care less if someone top-posts, bottom-posts, inline posts, side-posts, reverse posts, private posts, 3D posts, Saturn posts, etc. However, this is likely a minority, and there are community guidelines as others have pointed out. Personally, my responses are usually focussed responses to a particular question/comment (which I often put in quotation marks because I don't care for the ">" everywhere, I mean, we're still allowed to have preferences) or fairly extensive rants, which are comprehensive responses to the whole topic/thread. Speaking of standardizing every aspect of the netiquette on the mailing list, can we please reserve quotation marks for actual quotations and use apostrophes instead for 'random use'? (I'm joking, but this standardization of email exchange can become a slippery slope). I'm not saying that these approaches are correct or condoning them, but they have not gotten me into horrible trouble (and I'm a member of many OSS mailing lists) and have still allowed for helpful engagement. This likely says something very positive about the communities. Again, I am not condoning this. We all use different mail clients. What I find annoying, and it is no one's fault here (well, it actually could be, but I'm not going to point any fingers), are mailing-list emails where all I see is three horizontal dots when I open the message (see: Claudio Jeker's response to the "Folks are there any tips to improve page load times on smokeping running on OpenBSD" thread in Outlook). I realize this is my mail client. It is a correct way of doing e-mail correspondence. Still, as with many things, MS has made it incredibly annoying. Sincerely, Katie ________________________________ From: owner-m...@openbsd.org <owner-m...@openbsd.org> on behalf of Zé Loff <zel...@zeloff.org> Sent: 07 March 2023 05:39 To: Johannes Thyssen Tishman <johan...@thyssentishman.com> Cc: misc@openbsd.org <misc@openbsd.org> Subject: Re: Mail Etiquette: Reply above or below Attention : courriel externe | external email On Tue, Mar 07, 2023 at 09:36:10AM +0000, Johannes Thyssen Tishman wrote: > Hi, > > When I reply to an email I do so above the senders message, however I > see many people in the mailing lists replying below it. Is this the > preferred way or just preference? Thanks. > > Kind regards, > Johannes For OpenBSD's mailing lists, the netiquette rules are clearly presented here https://www.openbsd.org/mail.html. Another unwritten rule (and not exclusive to these lists, I'd say) is that if someone replies off-list you *don't* reply back through the list (i.e. you don't "pull" the reply back in to the list), at least not without asking first. There's probably a reason for someone not wanting their reply made public (otherwise they wouldn't have gone off-list) and it's rude to publish a private exchange. Cheers Zé --
