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7MAIL ETIQUETTE
8
9 1. About the lists
10 1.1 Mailing Lists
11 1.2 Netiquette
12 1.3 Do Not Mail a Single Individual
13 1.4 Subscription Required
14 1.5 Moderation of new posters
15 1.6 Handling trolls and spam
16 1.7 How to unsubscribe
17 1.8 I posted, now what?
18 1.9 Your emails are public
19
20 2. Sending mail
21 2.1 Reply or New Mail
22 2.2 Reply to the List
23 2.3 Use a Sensible Subject
24 2.4 Do Not Top-Post
25 2.5 HTML is not for mails
26 2.6 Quoting
27 2.7 Digest
28 2.8 Please Tell Us How You Solved The Problem
29
30==============================================================================
31
321. About the lists
33
34 1.1 Mailing Lists
35
36 The mailing lists we have are all listed and described at
37 https://curl.se/mail/
38
39 Each mailing list is targeted to a specific set of users and subjects,
40 please use the one or the ones that suit you the most.
41
42 Each mailing list has hundreds up to thousands of readers, meaning that each
43 mail sent will be received and read by a large number of people. People
44 from various cultures, regions, religions and continents.
45
46 1.2 Netiquette
47
48 Netiquette is a common term for how to behave on the Internet. Of course, in
49 each particular group and subculture there will be differences in what is
50 acceptable and what is considered good manners.
51
52 This document outlines what we in the curl project consider to be good
53 etiquette, and primarily this focus on how to behave on and how to use our
54 mailing lists.
55
56 1.3 Do Not Mail a Single Individual
57
58 Many people send one question to one person. One person gets many mails, and
59 there is only one person who can give you a reply. The question may be
60 something that other people would also like to ask. These other people have
61 no way to read the reply, but to ask the one person the question. The one
62 person consequently gets overloaded with mail.
63
64 If you really want to contact an individual and perhaps pay for his or her
65 services, by all means go ahead, but if it's just another curl question,
66 take it to a suitable list instead.
67
68 1.4 Subscription Required
69
70 All curl mailing lists require that you are subscribed to allow a mail to go
71 through to all the subscribers.
72
73 If you post without being subscribed (or from a different mail address than
74 the one you are subscribed with), your mail will simply be silently
75 discarded. You have to subscribe first, then post.
76
77 The reason for this unfortunate and strict subscription policy is of course
78 to stop spam from pestering the lists.
79
80 1.5 Moderation of new posters
81
82 Several of the curl mailing lists automatically make all posts from new
83 subscribers be moderated. This means that after you have subscribed and
84 sent your first mail to a list, that mail will not be let through to the
85 list until a mailing list administrator has verified that it is OK and
86 permits it to get posted.
87
88 Once a first post has been made that proves the sender is actually talking
89 about curl-related subjects, the moderation "flag" will be switched off and
90 future posts will go through without being moderated.
91
92 The reason for this moderation policy is that we do suffer from spammers who
93 actually subscribe and send spam to our lists.
94
95 1.6 Handling trolls and spam
96
97 Despite our good intentions and hard work to keep spam off the lists and to
98 maintain a friendly and positive atmosphere, there will be times when spam
99 and or trolls get through.
100
101 Troll - "someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages
102 in an online community"
103
104 Spam - "use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk
105 messages"
106
107 No matter what, we NEVER EVER respond to trolls or spammers on the list. If
108 you believe the list admin should do something in particular, contact them
109 off-list. The subject will be taken care of as much as possible to prevent
110 repeated offenses, but responding on the list to such messages never leads to
111 anything good and only puts the light even more on the offender: which was
112 the entire purpose of it getting sent to the list in the first place.
113
114 Do not feed the trolls.
115
116 1.7 How to unsubscribe
117
118 You can unsubscribe the same way you subscribed in the first place. You go
119 to the page for the particular mailing list you are subscribed to and you enter
120 your email address and password and press the unsubscribe button.
121
122 Also, the instructions to unsubscribe are included in the headers of every
123 mail that is sent out to all curl related mailing lists and there's a footer
124 in each mail that links to the "admin" page on which you can unsubscribe and
125 change other options.
126
127 You NEVER EVER email the mailing list requesting someone else to take you off
128 the list.
129
130 1.8 I posted, now what?
131
132 If you are not subscribed with the same email address that you used to send
133 the email, your post will just be silently discarded.
134
135 If you posted for the first time to the mailing list, you first need to wait
136 for an administrator to allow your email to go through (moderated). This
137 normally happens quickly but in case we are asleep, you may have to wait a
138 few hours.
139
140 Once your email goes through it is sent out to several hundred or even
141 thousands of recipients. Your email may cover an area that not that many
142 people know about or are interested in. Or possibly the person who knows
143 about it is on vacation or under a heavy work load right now. You may have
144 to wait for a response and you should not expect to get a response at all.
145 Ideally, you get an answer within a couple of days.
146
147 You do yourself and all of us a service when you include as many details as
148 possible already in your first email. Mention your operating system and
149 environment. Tell us which curl version you are using and tell us what you
150 did, what happened and what you expected would happen. Preferably, show us
151 what you did with details enough to allow others to help point out the
152 problem or repeat the steps in their locations.
153
154 Failing to include details will only delay responses and make people respond
155 and ask for more details and you will have to send a follow-up email that
156 includes them.
157
158 Expect the responses to primarily help YOU debug the issue, or ask YOU
159 questions that can lead you or others towards a solution or explanation to
160 whatever you experience.
161
162 If you are a repeat offender to the guidelines outlined in this document,
163 chances are that people will ignore you at will and your chances to get
164 responses in the future will greatly diminish.
165
166 1.9 Your emails are public
167
168 Your email, its contents and all its headers and the details in those
169 headers will be received by every subscriber of the mailing list that you
170 send your email to.
171
172 Your email as sent to a curl mailing list will end up in mail archives, on
173 the curl website and elsewhere, for others to see and read. Today and in
174 the future. In addition to the archives, the mail is sent out to thousands
175 of individuals. There is no way to undo a sent email.
176
177 When sending emails to a curl mailing list, do not include sensitive
178 information such as user names and passwords; use fake ones, temporary ones
179 or just remove them completely from the mail. Note that this includes base64
180 encoded HTTP Basic auth headers.
181
182 This public nature of the curl mailing lists makes automatically inserted mail
183 footers about mails being "private" or "only meant for the recipient" or
184 similar even more silly than usual. Because they are absolutely not private
185 when sent to a public mailing list.
186
187
1882. Sending mail
189
190 2.1 Reply or New Mail
191
192 Please do not reply to an existing message as a short-cut to post a message
193 to the lists.
194
195 Many mail programs and web archivers use information within mails to keep
196 them together as "threads", as collections of posts that discuss a certain
197 subject. If you do not intend to reply on the same or similar subject, do not
198 just hit reply on an existing mail and change the subject, create a new mail.
199
200 2.2 Reply to the List
201
202 When replying to a message from the list, make sure that you do "group
203 reply" or "reply to all", and not just reply to the author of the single
204 mail you reply to.
205
206 We are actively discouraging replying back to the single person by setting
207 the Reply-To: field in outgoing mails back to the mailing list address,
208 making it harder for people to mail the author directly, if only by mistake.
209
210 2.3 Use a Sensible Subject
211
212 Please use a subject of the mail that makes sense and that is related to the
213 contents of your mail. It makes it a lot easier to find your mail afterwards
214 and it makes it easier to track mail threads and topics.
215
216 2.4 Do Not Top-Post
217
218 If you reply to a message, do not use top-posting. Top-posting is when you
219 write the new text at the top of a mail and you insert the previous quoted
220 mail conversation below. It forces users to read the mail in a backwards
221 order to properly understand it.
222
223 This is why top posting is so bad (in top posting order):
224
225 A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
226 Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
227 A: Top-posting.
228 Q: What is the most annoying thing in email?
229
230 Apart from the screwed up read order (especially when mixed together in a
231 thread when someone responds using the mandated bottom-posting style), it
232 also makes it impossible to quote only parts of the original mail.
233
234 When you reply to a mail. You let the mail client insert the previous mail
235 quoted. Then you put the cursor on the first line of the mail and you move
236 down through the mail, deleting all parts of the quotes that do not add
237 context for your comments. When you want to add a comment you do so, inline,
238 right after the quotes that relate to your comment. Then you continue
239 downwards again.
240
241 When most of the quotes have been removed and you have added your own words,
242 you are done.
243
244 2.5 HTML is not for mails
245
246 Please switch off those HTML encoded messages. You can mail all those funny
247 mails to your friends. We speak plain text mails.
248
249 2.6 Quoting
250
251 Quote as little as possible. Just enough to provide the context you cannot
252 leave out. A lengthy description can be found here:
253
254 https://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html
255
256 2.7 Digest
257
258 We allow subscribers to subscribe to the "digest" version of the mailing
259 lists. A digest is a collection of mails lumped together in one single mail.
260
261 Should you decide to reply to a mail sent out as a digest, there are two
262 things you MUST consider if you really really cannot subscribe normally
263 instead:
264
265 Cut off all mails and chatter that is not related to the mail you want to
266 reply to.
267
268 Change the subject name to something sensible and related to the subject,
269 preferably even the actual subject of the single mail you wanted to reply to
270
271 2.8 Please Tell Us How You Solved The Problem
272
273 Many people mail questions to the list, people spend some of their time and
274 make an effort in providing good answers to these questions.
275
276 If you are the one who asks, please consider responding once more in case
277 one of the hints was what solved your problems. The guys who write answers
278 feel good to know that they provided a good answer and that you fixed the
279 problem. Far too often, the person who asked the question is never heard from
280 again, and we never get to know if they are gone because the problem was
281 solved or perhaps because the problem was unsolvable.
282
283 Getting the solution posted also helps other users that experience the same
284 problem(s). They get to see (possibly in the web archives) that the
285 suggested fixes actually have helped at least one person.