Mailing lists have been around for a long time, and there's an established way of participating in them. Not only does the discussion in mailing lists tend to be more focused than in other media, but it's also more personal.
There's a vital reason why you should follow mailing list netiquette. The list owner has supreme power over the list. If a subscriber insists on violating list guidelines or flagrantly violates mailing list netiquette, it's a simple matter for the list owner to ban the violator.
That might seem a bit harsh, but a mailing list depends on the cooperation of its subscribers. Getting involved in a mailing list can be a little intimidating at first. But there'll be no problem as long as you follow a few simple points of mailing list netiquette.
DOs
- The Primary Rule: You send your commands to the list server and your messages to the mailing list. You don't want to send a message that only says "SUBSCRIBE" to hundreds of people.
- Save the welcome message you receive. It will give you basic list server commands for subscribing and unsubscribing to that mailing list.
- Always include a descriptive subject line in your message. Avoid non-ASCII characters in subject lines, like german Umlaute etc.
- Always post with your real name. Mailing lists are already anonymous enough...
- Only post in text format.
- If you need to communicate other data (images, documents), ask who's interested in and send it to their personal email adresses.
- Separate your signature using "--". This is a common way and many mail clients rely on this behaviour to identify text as signature.
- Learn to quote: Only include relevant parts of the message you're replying to. Shorten the text you're refering to to a minimum. If necessary, try to summarize and use brackets ( '[ summarized text ]'). Always reply below quoted text, allowing chronological reading.
- If you want to mark passages or words, use '*' signs or underscores '_'. Words in capital letters are interpreted as SCREAMING.
- Text lines should be wrapped after not longer than 65 characters.
DON'Ts
- Don't spam the list. Specific mailing list guidelines may vary. But as a rule, commercial announcements, advertisements, chain letters, test messages, and other low-value messages should not be sent to the list.
- Don't bounce: If you're going on vacation, suspend your subscription until you get back - especially if you think your e-mail box might fill up. If you're canceling or changing your e-mail account, change your subscription or let the list owner know what's going on. If mail can't get to you, it will "bounce" back to the list owner, who has to deal with it.
- Never attach binary data (images, .doc etc). It generates unnecessary amounts of traffic and is an annoyance for people to download.
- Don't send HTML mails, most people won't read it. Additionally, it generates way too much traffic and HTML postings can't be archived.
- Don't include signatures longer than 4 lines. This does not only apply for mailing list postings but for email in general.
- No full-text quotes! The worst things you can do is TOFU ("Text oben, Fullquote unten": Text above, full quote below).
- Only use 'Re:' as prefix for replies, never use Outlook's german 'AW:' or other funny inventions. Otherwise, list members are not able to use message threading.
- The quote sign is '>'. Don't use anything different unless you want to be hated by everyone.
