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6
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.haxx.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
43  each mail sent will be received and read by a very large number of people.
44  People 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've 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 him/her
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  Don't 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're 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 aren't subscribed with the exact same email address that you used to
133  send 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 normally
137  happens very quickly but in case we're asleep, you may have to wait a few
138  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 people
142  know about or are interested in. Or possibly the person who knows about it
143  is on vacation or under a very heavy work load right now. You may have to wait
144  for a response and you should not expect to get a response at all, but
145  hopefully 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're 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 problem
152  or repeat the same 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 web site 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 don't intend to reply on the same or similar subject, don't
198  just hit reply on an existing mail and change 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're 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, don't 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 e-mail?
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 don't 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've added your own words,
242  you're 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 he/she is 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 has helped at least one person.
286