When you are sending e-mail to your friend you have a pretty good idea
what kind of message you can send. You probably know if they are on a fast
internet connection so attachments don't take a LONG time to download. Or
that the special fonts, bold, italicized, or colored text, etc. you want
to use will display correctly on their monitor.
The same can't be said when you send e-mail to a mailing list
where hundreds of people will see your message. To be a good member of
your mailing list you should make sure you are sending messages that list
subscribers can read.
Basically the further you get from plain text the fewer people will be
able to read your message.
Here are some common pointers I found when I did a Google search for "mailing list etiquette":
- When replying to a message please crop away any useless quoted text, for
example office phone numbers, mailing list details, irrelevant parts of
the conversation, etc. Please do keep "So and so wrote:" tags so that
someone reading an e-mail can follow the quoted conversation without
having to hunt back through the thread to see who said what.
- Avoid posting in HTML. It makes it hard to read for some people and
bloats the e-mail size. Post in plain text instead.
- Avoid posting large attachments. It is nicer to find some web space
somewhere and post a URL to it rather than spam 1000 mailing list
readers' long suffering inboxes with a largish file. PasteBin, Google
webspace, and Flickr are three places you might post .
- Don't use text styles (like bold or italic) or text colors in mailing
list messages, since many people won't see them and may even see HTML
tags instead.
- Use some technique to identify which text came from the original
message, and which text you add. A common convention is to prepend ">"
to the original message. Leaving white space after the ">" and leaving
empty lines between your text and the original text both make the result
more readable.
- Please ensure that the attributions of the text you are quoting is
correct. People can become offended if you attribute words to them that
they themselves did not write.
News 