5 \___|\___/|_| \_\_____|
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?
22 2.3 Use a Sensible Subject
24 2.5 HTML is not for mails
27 2.8 Please Tell Us How You Solved The Problem!
29 ==============================================================================
35 The mailing lists we have are all listed and described at
36 http://curl.haxx.se/mail/
38 Each mailing list is targeted to a specific set of users and subjects,
39 please use the one or the ones that suit you the most.
41 Each mailing list have hundreds up to thousands of readers, meaning that
42 each mail sent will be received and read by a very large amount of people.
43 People from various cultures, regions, religions and continents.
47 Netiquette is a common name for how to behave on the internet. Of course, in
48 each particular group and subculture there will be differences in what is
49 acceptable and what is considered good manners.
51 This document outlines what we in the cURL project considers to be good
52 etiquette, and primarily this focus on how to behave on and how to use our
55 1.3 Do Not Mail a Single Individual
57 Many people send one question to one person. One person gets many mails, and
58 there is only one person who can give you a reply. The question may be
59 something that other people are also wanting to ask. These other people have
60 no way to read the reply, but to ask the one person the question. The one
61 person consequently gets overloaded with mail.
63 If you really want to contact an individual and perhaps pay for his or her
64 services, by all means go ahead, but if it's just another curl question,
65 take it to a suitable list instead.
67 1.4 Subscription Required
69 All curl mailing lists require that you are subscribed to allow a mail to go
70 through to all the subscribers.
72 If you post without being subscribed (or from a different mail address than
73 the one you are subscribed with), your mail will simply be silently
74 discarded. You have to subscribe first, then post.
76 The reason for this unfortunate and strict subscription policy is of course
77 to stop spam from pestering the lists.
79 1.5 Moderation of new posters
81 Several of the curl mailing lists automatically make all posts from new
82 subscribers require moderation. This means that after you've subscribed and
83 send your first mail to a list, that mail will not be let through to the
84 list until a mailing list administrator has verified that it is OK and
85 permits it to get posted.
87 Once a first post has been made that proves the sender is actually talking
88 about curl-related subjects, the moderation "flag" will be switched off and
89 future posts will go through without being moderated.
91 The reason for this moderation policy is that we do suffer from spammers who
92 actually subscribe and send spam to our lists.
94 1.6 Handling trolls and spam
96 Despite our good intentions and hard work to keep spam off the lists and to
97 maintain a friendly and positive atmosphere, there will be times when spam
98 and or trolls get through.
100 Troll - "someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages
101 in an online community"
103 Spam - "use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk
106 No matter what, we NEVER EVER respond to trolls or spammers on the list. If
107 you believe the list admin should do something particular, contact him/her
108 off-list. The subject will be taken care of as good as possible to prevent
109 repeated offenses, but responding on the list to such messages never lead to
110 anything good and only puts the light even more on the offender: which was
111 the entire purpose of it getting to the list in the first place.
113 Don't feed the trolls!
115 1.7 How to unsubscribe
117 You unsubscribe the same way you subscribed in the first place. You go to
118 the page for the particular mailing list you're subscribed to and you enter
119 your email address and password and press the unsubscribe button.
121 Also, this information is included in the headers of every mail that is sent
122 out to all curl related mailing lists and there's footer in each mail that
123 links to the "admin" page on which you can unsubscribe and change other
126 You NEVER EVER email the mailing list requesting someone else to get you off
129 1.8 I posted, now what?
131 If you aren't subscribed with the exact same email address that you used to
132 send the email, your post will just be silently discarded.
134 If you posted for the first time to the mailing list, you first need to wait
135 for an administrator to allow your email to go through. This normally
136 happens very quickly but in case we're asleep, you may have to wait a few
139 Once your email goes through it is sent out to several hundred or even
140 thousand recipients. Your email may cover an area that not that many people
141 know about or are interested in. Or possibly the person who knows about it
142 is on vacation or under a very heavy work load right now. You have to wait
143 for a response and you must not expect to get a response at all, but
144 hopefully you get an answer within a couple of days.
146 You do yourself and all of us a service when you include as many details as
147 possible already in your first email. Mention your operating system and
148 environment. Tell us which curl version you're using and tell us what you
149 did, what happened and what you expected would happen. Preferably, show us
150 what you did in details enough to allow others to help point out the problem
151 or repeat the same steps in their places.
153 Failing to include details will only delay responses and make people respond
154 and ask for the details and you have to send a follow-up email that includes
157 Expect the responses to primarily help YOU debug the issue, or ask you
158 questions that can lead you or others towards a solution or explanation to
159 whatever you experience.
161 If you are a repeat offender to the guidelines outlined in this document,
162 chances are that people will ignore you at will and your chances to get
163 responses will greatly diminish.
168 2.1 Reply or New Mail
170 Please do not reply to an existing message as a short-cut to post a message
173 Many mail programs and web archivers use information within mails to keep
174 them together as "threads", as collections of posts that discuss a certain
175 subject. If you don't intend to reply on the same or similar subject, don't
176 just hit reply on an existing mail and change subject, create a new mail.
178 2.2 Reply to the List
180 When replying to a message from the list, make sure that you do "group
181 reply" or "reply to all", and not just reply to the author of the single
184 We're actively discouraging replying back to the single person by setting
185 the Reply-To: field in outgoing mails back to the mailing list address,
186 making it harder for people to mail the author only by mistake.
188 2.3 Use a Sensible Subject
190 Please use a subject of the mail that makes sense and that is related to the
191 contents of your mail. It makes it a lot easier to find your mail afterwards
192 and it makes it easier to track mail threads and topics.
196 If you reply to a message, don't use top-posting. Top-posting is when you
197 write the new text at the top of a mail and you insert the previous quoted
198 mail conversation below. It forces users to read the mail in a backwards
199 order to properly understand it.
201 This is why top posting is so bad:
203 A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read
205 Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
207 Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
209 Apart from the screwed up read order (especially when mixed together in a
210 thread when someone responds using the mandated bottom-posting style), it
211 also makes it impossible to quote only parts of the original mail.
213 When you reply to a mail. You let the mail client insert the previous mail
214 quoted. Then you put the cursor on the first line of the mail and you move
215 down through the mail, deleting all parts of the quotes that don't add
216 context for your comments. When you want to add a comment you do so, inline,
217 right after the quotes that relate to your comment. Then you continue
220 When most of the quotes have been removed and you've added your own words,
223 2.5 HTML is not for mails
225 Please switch off those HTML encoded messages. You can mail all those funny
226 mails to your friends. We speak plain text mails.
230 Quote as little as possible. Just enough to provide the context you cannot
231 leave out. A lengthy description can be found here:
233 http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html
237 We allow subscribers to subscribe to the "digest" version of the mailing
238 lists. A digest is a collection of mails lumped together in one single mail.
240 Should you decide to reply to a mail sent out as a digest, there are two
241 things you MUST consider if you really really cannot subscribe normally
244 Cut off all mails and chatter that is not related to the mail you want to
247 Change the subject name to something sensible and related to the subject,
248 preferably even the actual subject of the single mail you wanted to reply to
250 2.8 Please Tell Us How You Solved The Problem!
252 Many people mail questions to the list, people spend some of their time and
253 make an effort in providing good answers to these questions.
255 If you are the one who asks, please consider responding once more in case
256 one of the hints was what solved your problems. The guys who write answers
257 feel good to know that they provided a good answer and that you fixed the
258 problem. Far too often, the person who asked the question is never heard of
259 again, and we never get to know if he/she is gone because the problem was
260 solved or perhaps because the problem was unsolvable!
262 Getting the solution posted also helps other users that experience the same
263 problem(s). They get to see (possibly in the web archives) that the
264 suggested fixes actually has helped at least one person.