Mailing List Etiquette was freebsd vs. netbsd

[@lbutlr]

On 10 Jun 2020, at 11:54, doug <doug at fledge.watson.org> wrote:
> See https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/mailing-list-faq/etiquette.html#idp44832888

Seems very out of date too me. For example the first thing it says is to wrap messages at 75 characters  because not everyone uses GUI mailers. This may have been relevant in 1995, but it sure isn’t now. CLI MUA’s handle long lines just fine.

Standard Compliant MUAs are pretty universal, and worrying about if yours is or is not is largely a waste of time.

I don’t think correct clocks are much of an issue in 2020 either as most of the Internet randomly will break if your clock is off.

MIME is fine, as long as you do not enforce formatting on your text (For example, any messages I get with a forced white background and black text I delete unread; similarly, if you think it’s clever to set your font to 10pts because that looks good to you, it gets binned).

That said, try to use plain-text whenever possible. MIME messages for attachments and significant data or metadata that may be lost in plain text, fine. But if you garbage up your message with an unreadable HTML version just because you like it, that’s not.

Same goes for images you attach to advertise your company. I would say attachments as part of the signature are never OK, but that might just be me.

One thing missing is “don’t post 20 line signatures”. It’s best to try to keep your signatures at 4 lines or less, though some occasional variation is fine.

The admonition to not top post is wrong, as bottom posting is also bad. The correct behavior is to interleave your post, responding to each part of the original separately. Of course, if you only respond to ONE part, it follows so it looks like a top post. But 500 quoted lines with “me too” at the end is actually worse than 500 quoted lines with "me too” at the start. To be clear, both are very bad.

The rest seems fine.

Talking about what characters to use for quoting seems very… not even 1995, more like 1985.

Some mailers will go to great lengths to prevent proper quoting, but as far as I know those that do make it impossible for the user to edit the message to do it correctly.