Message Guidelines
The following are general guidelines that should be observed when posting messages to a Mailman mailing list.
- Privacy policy
- Privacy policies differ between lists. Find out if it is appropriate to copy parts of postings off the list before you do it.
- Personal Mail
- Just as it is important to try to share public information with the whole group, private correspondence should remain just that -- private. Send personal messages directly to individuals, not by way of the list.
- Quality of Communication
- If you find something posted on the list objectionable, you have every
right to voice your objections -- but not in public. Please express your
complaints directly to the person responsible. If enough complaints are
received, it is unlikely the offender will post those kinds of messages
again. You can also, of course, simply discard (not read) all mail from
an offending writer. If you would like to contact the list owner, you can
do so by sending email to
listname-owner@uwex.edu where
listname is replaced with the actual name of the list.
Note that this does NOT address harassment or illegal activites. Such instances should be reported to UWC-UWEX Information Technology Services by sending email to list-help@uwex.edu. - Censorship
- Some Mailman mailing lists are "unmoderated" lists. This means what members post goes directly to other members. To keep lists uncensored, it is important that only pertinent messages are posted to the list. Members whose messages do not meet minimum expectations may be notified by the list owner or site administrator, and may be excluded permanently from future participation.
- Responding to a posting
- If you respond to a posting, pay attention to whether you are addressing the whole list or just the author. A common mistake made in mailing list interaction is the sending of messages meant only to one person to the entire list.
- Meaningful Subject Line
- When sending messages to a Mailman mailing list, make sure the entry in the Subject line is clear and descriptive.
- Humor
- Humor is appreciated, but please remember that humor in email can easily be misinterpreted. One way to express emotion is to use smilies. For example: humorous :-) , ironic ;-) , or sad :-( .
- Provide Context
- Every posting should begin with a clear introduction to the topic, or
offer some kind of reference to the topic or a previous posting. There are
often several "threads" of discussion going on simultaneously, which makes
unreferenced postings confusing to readers.
A popular way of providing context is to quote verbatim from the original message. However, keep the quotations *short* and *relevant*. Quoting whole messages, signatures and all, can be inconsiderate. - List Culture
- Read the list for a while before posting. Each list has its own culture, so "listen" for a while before you "speak up."
- Include a Signature
- Be sure to sign your full name at the bottom of your posting and include your affiliation(s) and email address. Some subscribers may receive their email messages with the header information stripped away by their local system and therefore cannot know the author of a particular posting.
- Sending List Attachments
-
If you have a formatted document that you want to make available
to your list members, the best way would be to place a text version
of your document in the body
of your message and then place a web url in your message
where the member can download the formatted document.
The more members that you have on a list, the less you should send attachments. You should never send a large attachment to any list, and never send any attachment to a list with many members.
There are several reasons why attachments are a bad idea. Consider the following:
- Attachments are generally formatted documents and are much larger than text documents. Therefore they can use up a lot of disk space. This is especially true for Power Point Presentations and some files saved using "rich text format". Exercise restraint whenever you consider sending out an attachment with your message.
- Know the size of the file before you attach it to a message.
- Determine how many members you have on the list, generally the larger the list, the less you should send attachments of any kind.
- Calculate how much space it will use. For example, if you want to attach a file, and determine it is 1 megabyte in size, and your list has 2000 members, a quick calculation will tell you that this message will use up about 2 gigabytes of disk space on someone's mail server. It is easy to overwhelm computer systems resources.
- At the University of Wisconsin, 1 gigabyte stored for 1 month costs approximately $5.84. The total cost for 1 gigabye stored for one year is about $70.00. So the above one message with attachment would cost about $140.00 to store it for one year, assuming no one deleted the message.
- It is possible that the message will not reach everyone on your list because some mail systems put an arbitrary size limit on all messages which they will accept. You may or may not get notification that the email was not delivered.
- Depending how you save a document, some of the members may not be able to open the document.
- Viruses are spread via attachments.
- If a member has a slow dialup connection to their internet provider, it may take a fairly long time to download the message.
* This web site is based on code graciously provided by http://www.washington.edu/computing/ .