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
21 2.3 Use a Sensible Subject
23 2.5 HTML is not for mails
26 2.8 Please Tell Us How You Solved The Problem!
28 ==============================================================================
34 The mailing lists we have are all listed and described at
35 http://curl.haxx.se/mail/
37 Each mailing list is targeted to a specific set of users and subjects,
38 please use the one or the ones that suit you the most.
40 Each mailing list have hundreds up to thousands of readers, meaning that
41 each mail sent will be received and read by a very large amount of people.
42 People from various cultures, regions, religions and continents.
46 Netiquette is a common name for how to behave on the internet. Of course, in
47 each particular group and subculture there will be differences in what is
48 acceptable and what is considered good manners.
50 This document outlines what we in the cURL project considers to be good
51 etiquette, and primarily this focus on how to behave on and how to use our
54 1.3 Do Not Mail a Single Individual
56 Many people send one question to one person. One person gets many mails, and
57 there is only one person who can give you a reply. The question may be
58 something that other people are also wanting to ask. These other people have
59 no way to read the reply, but to ask the one person the question. The one
60 person consequently gets overloaded with mail.
62 If you really want to contact an individual and perhaps pay for his or her
63 services, by all means go ahead, but if it's just another curl question,
64 take it to a suitable list instead.
66 1.4 Subscription Required
68 All curl mailing lists require that you are subscribed to allow a mail to go
69 through to all the subscribers.
71 If you post without being subscribed (or from a different mail address than
72 the one you are subscribed with), your mail will simply be silently
73 discarded. You have to subscribe first, then post.
75 The reason for this unfortunate and strict subscription policy is of course
76 to stop spam from pestering the lists.
78 1.5 Moderation of new posters
80 Several of the curl mailing lists automatically make all posts from new
81 subscribers require moderation. This means that after you've subscribed and
82 send your first mail to a list, that mail will not be let through to the
83 list until a mailing list administrator has verified that it is OK and
84 permits it to get posted.
86 Once a first post has been made that proves the sender is actually talking
87 about curl-related subjects, the moderation "flag" will be switched off and
88 future posts will go through without being moderated.
90 The reason for this moderation policy is that we do suffer from spammers who
91 actually subscribe and send spam to our lists.
93 1.6 Handling trolls and spam
95 Despite our good intentions and hard work to keep spam off the lists and to
96 maintain a friendly and positive atmosphere, there will be times when spam
97 and or trolls get through.
99 Troll - "someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages
100 in an online community"
102 Spam - "use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk
105 No matter what, we NEVER EVER respond to trolls or spammers on the list. If
106 you believe the list admin should do something particular, contact him/her
107 off-list. The subject will be taken care of as good as possible to prevent
108 repeated offences, but responding on the list to such messages never lead to
109 anything good and only puts the light even more on the offender: which was
110 the entire purpose of it getting to the list in the first place.
112 Don't feed the trolls!
114 1.7 How to unsubscribe
116 You unsubscribe the same way you subscribed in the first place. You go to
117 the page for the particular mailing list you're subscribed to and you enter
118 your email address and password and press the unsubscribe button.
120 Also, this information is included in the headers of every mail that is sent
121 out to all curl related mailing lists and there's footer in each mail that
122 links to the "admin" page on which you can unsubscribe and change other
125 You NEVER EVER email the mailing list requesting someone else to get you off
131 2.1 Reply or New Mail
133 Please do not reply to an existing message as a short-cut to post a message
136 Many mail programs and web archivers use information within mails to keep
137 them together as "threads", as collections of posts that discuss a certain
138 subject. If you don't intend to reply on the same or similar subject, don't
139 just hit reply on an existing mail and change subject, create a new mail.
141 2.2 Reply to the List
143 When replying to a message from the list, make sure that you do "group
144 reply" or "reply to all", and not just reply to the author of the single
147 We're actively discouraging replying back to the single person by setting
148 the Reply-To: field in outgoing mails back to the mailing list address,
149 making it harder for people to mail the author only by mistake.
151 2.3 Use a Sensible Subject
153 Please use a subject of the mail that makes sense and that is related to the
154 contents of your mail. It makes it a lot easier to find your mail afterwards
155 and it makes it easier to track mail threads and topics.
159 If you reply to a message, don't use top-posting. Top-posting is when you
160 write the new text at the top of a mail and you insert the previous quoted
161 mail conversation below. It forces users to read the mail in a backwards
162 order to properly understand it.
164 This is why top posting is so bad:
166 A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read
168 Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
170 Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
172 Apart from the screwed up read order (especially when mixed together in a
173 thread when someone responds using the mandated bottom-posting style), it
174 also makes it impossible to quote only parts of the original mail.
176 When you reply to a mail. You let the mail client insert the previous mail
177 quoted. Then you put the cursor on the first line of the mail and you move
178 down through the mail, deleting all parts of the quotes that don't add
179 context for your comments. When you want to add a comment you do so, inline,
180 right after the quotes that relate to your comment. Then you continue
183 When most of the quotes have been removed and you've added your own words,
186 2.5 HTML is not for mails
188 Please switch off those HTML encoded messages. You can mail all those funny
189 mails to your friends. We speak plain text mails.
193 Quote as little as possible. Just enough to provide the context you cannot
194 leave out. A lengthy description can be found here:
196 http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html
200 We allow subscribers to subscribe to the "digest" version of the mailing
201 lists. A digest is a collection of mails lumped together in one single mail.
203 Should you decide to reply to a mail sent out as a digest, there are two
204 things you MUST consider if you really really cannot subscribe normally
207 Cut off all mails and chatter that is not related to the mail you want to
210 Change the subject name to something sensible and related to the subject,
211 preferably even the actual subject of the single mail you wanted to reply to
213 2.8 Please Tell Us How You Solved The Problem!
215 Many people mail questions to the list, people spend some of their time and
216 make an effort in providing good answers to these questions.
218 If you are the one who asks, please consider responding once more in case
219 one of the hints was what solved your problems. The guys who write answers
220 feel good to know that they provided a good answer and that you fixed the
221 problem. Far too often, the person who asked the question is never heard of
222 again, and we never get to know if he/she is gone because the problem was
223 solved or perhaps because the problem was unsolvable!
225 Getting the solution posted also helps other users that experience the same
226 problem(s). They get to see (possibly in the web archives) that the
227 suggested fixes actually has helped at least one person.