Netiquette

I've used the Internet almost daily since 1993, and sporadically for twenty years before. In that time, I've probably committed most of the errors below. This is your chance to learn from my mistakes.

Remember, not everyone uses the same platform you do, and not everyone gets their email the same way you do. People use mobile phones, laptops, and servers as well as desktops to read mail, and they get it over broadband, dial-up and mobile phone connections. And more and more, they get it in parts of the world that do not have reliable electricity or phone service.

The reason we have etiquette (of which netiquette is but a special case) is to facilitate communications. These are the same reasons we have grammar, spelling, punctuation and other rules of language use. They have evolved over time, almost always for good reason. We should be careful to observe them unless we have good reason (and the experience with them to know what is good reason) to do otherwise.

It may help you to think of etiquette as a set of standards for meat to meat communications, analogous to standards for computer to computer communications. The alternative is to look like an illiterate buffoon.

For some of the historical reasons behind netiquette, see Doran Barton' essay, Netiquette is Good Netizenship

Email

Much of this probably applies to news groups as well.

Privacy And/Or Security
1. When sending to a number of people, use BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) rather than CC. This protects each recipient's privacy from the other recipients. This helps reduce spam. It can be very important if, say, one of the recipients is dealing with a stalker! It may also help prevent the spread of viruses.
  
  If your mail reader doesn't show you a BCC field in the GUI, there is probably a setting to turn it on. If not, get another mail reader.
2. Do not give out peoples' email addresses without permission from the addressee, for the same reasons. You may offer to forward an email to the addressee so that the addressee can make the decision.
3. Use Gnu Privacy Guard (GPG) or Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) to affix a digital signature to your email and to encrypt it. A digital signature authenticates a message, and is a legal signature in many jurisdictions. Post your public key to a key server. Assume that anything you send on the Internet will be read.
4. Do not propagate email "virus warnings". Many of these are hoaxes, or "wetware viruses". Readers who follow the instructions in hoaxes risk damaging their computer to the point of rendering it unbootable or loosing data.
  
  Instead, unless the person who sent you the warning is someone very knowledgeable about computer security (like a good corporate network administrator), please warn the sender that the email could be a hoax, and ask them not to propagate it. I usually research such warnings at reputable site like F-Secure or Symantec and inform the sender of my conclusions, with citations.
  
  More generally, don't propagate any hoaxes. Check them out at reliable sources like the Computer Incident Advisory Capability (CIAC)'s hoaxbusters page.
5. For your own protection as well as courtesy, if you use a "vacation" program (one that generates responses to emails that say, "I'm on vacation; if this is an emergency, please contact someone else."), please see to it that it does not respond to list traffic.
6. Read "Libertarians and the Privacy of Friends." You don't have to be a libertarian to learn from it. You could save someone's life.
Courtesy

Remember, when you send someone an email, you are asking a favor of them. You are asking them to take the time to read your email, and perhaps answer a question. Invite them to read it and respond, and make it easy for them to do so.
1. Keep your email short and sweet. Aside from just plain good writing, this is also a courtesy to your readers.
  1. Not everyone has broadband. Some people have slow modem connections to the Internet. Some folks in rural areas think they're doing well to get 2400 baud.
  2. Some people get their email via mobile telephones, so they pay by the minute. Don't make them pay for your sloppiness.
  3. Some people have metered access to the Internet. Again, they should not have to pay extra.
  4. Some people have very slow access (mobile phone users and many people in poorer countries). Sometimes they may think their computer has crashed when in fact it is simply digesting an obese email.
  In general, keep your posts below 50 kilobytes, even less if you know you have a reader on a mobile phone or with very slow access. This particularly applies to newsgroups and email lists, where you do not know every recipient's situation.
  
  When bringing an item on the Web to your readers' attention, don't just copy the whole thing into your email and ship it. Instead, keep it short. Copy the headline, byline, first two or three paragraphs and the URL into your email. This is an acceptable "fair use" of copyrighted material, and also helps to ensure that the web site will get the hits upon which their advertising revenue may depend. Make sure that it is obvious which part or your email is a quote and which is your commentary. Use quote marks or indentation or otherwise set off the quote from your commentary.
  
  Trim from the reply material you are not responding to. There should be enough of the original to give a context to your reply, and no more. Any less and the reader won't know what you are talking about. Any more, and you will have more material than the reader will want to digest, making it less attractive to read your email.
  
  If you have a lot of material that you think your readers should see, do not put it in the email. Instead, put it on a web page or FTP server. Include a short description of the material, and the URL in a message to your reader(s).
2. Please set your mail reader to include and quote the original text in replies.
  
  The standard for quoting is to put "> " in front of each quoted line, like so:
```
Aunt Matilda <matilda@wallaby.com.au> wrote:

> Happy birthday, Fred!

Thank you, Aunt Matilda.

How is Uncle George?
```
  Another reason to make authorship clear is copyrights. The US and other jurisdictions grant an immediate copyright on any document without requiring a copyright notice. Clear attribution allows a later reader to correctly identify the author of a snipped so that the reader can obtain permission to use the snippet. Granted, this is not a likely issue, but why not do things in the most courteous manner the first time?
3. When responding to email, please reply below the material to which you are responding. The natural movement of the eye is from top to bottom. Your reader should have the opportunity to read or glance through the material to which you are responding before getting to your response.
  
  As one .sig line seen on the net says,
```
A: Because we read from top to bottom, left to right.
Q: Why should i start my reply below the quoted text?
```
  This is called "bottom posting".
  
  Another reason to avoid top posting is that you might avoid replying to the wrong message in the heat of anger or some other emotion. I've seen it happen.
4. Feel free to break up the original paragraph so that you can make your reply less confusing. Of course, it helps to have an editor that will reformat paragraphs and keep the quote characters intact. Emacs' mail mode does this. I don't know of any other programs that will do it. This is called "interleaved posting" or "inline posting" and is far and away easier on the reader's eyes and brains.
  
  For some examples of each type of posting see Wikipedia's entry.
5. Please do not sent HTML (Highly Toxic to Mail Language) email.
  1. It wastes space. HTML email takes up far more disk space and bandwidth than plain text. Some email programs send both a plain text and an HTML version, further compounding the problem.
  2. Not everyone has a mail reader that handles HTML mail gracefully. Sending them HTML mail is rude, and they (quite understandably) are less likely to read your email. This is pareticularly a problem for folks who get their list traffic in digest form.
  3. Your email reader may show your HTML mail fine. The next person's may not, and if they reply, your email may be mangled beyond readability. Instead, give your correspondents email which they may read and to which they can reply gracefully with any mail reader.
  4. Some list archiving programs do not handle HTML mail well, making HTML mail unreadable in the list's archives. This defeats the purpose of the list archive: to let readers find messages relevant to their query without actually posting on the list.
  5. Unscrupulous spammers (if you will pardon the redundancy) and other scum use HTML mail as trojan horses to propagate "adware", "sneakware", "spyware" and other malware. An innocent-appearing URL in HTML email may redirect to a phishing web site. One might reasonably refuse to open HTML mail for fear of such attacks. See "Spyware epidemic rallies call for action"
  6. Some lists prohibit HTML email; others discourage it.
  7. However, you may wish to join the ASCII Ribbon Campaign against HTML e-mail and proprietary formats.
  Some folks place notices in their .sig lines, e.g.:
```
HTML mails are going to trash automatically
```
  For more information, see Configuring Mail Clients to Send Plain ASCII Text and How to Turn Off HTML in Your Outgoing Mail Messages. There are some notes on this toward the bottom of the RedHat Install List (RHIL) Unofficial User's Guide.
6. When sending graphics, please use graphics formats that:
  1. Everyone can display, like JPEG (.jpg or .jpeg), PNG (.png) or GIF (.gif).
  2. Use compression. Any of the three formats above use compression. JPEG tends to do better (smaller) with photographs.
    
    Someone recently sent me a TIFF photograph. Using ImageMagick's convert program, I produced the following:
    
    Format Size (Bytes)
    
    GIF 356,388
    
    TIFF 315,346
    
    PNG 64,357
    
    JPEG 18,336
    
    Any of the four formats would have been fine for our purpose. Yet only the JPEG version would have fit the 50KB rule above.
  Even with graphics, please keep the emails small.
7. Do not send documents in proprietary formats such as Microsoft Word. Not everyone has or uses your proprietary document format. See We Can Put an End to Word Attachments for several reasons to avoid them.
8. Set your line length to 72 characters. This comes from the old days when most terminals were 80 characters wide, and longer lines caused problems. The difference of eight is to allow for quoting. Longer line lengths may still cause problems as other mail readers mangle your message in quotes. Too short a line length may mangle other people's emails in quotes.
9. Use a mono spaced font like courier. You have no idea which font your recipients will use, and mono space is the lowest common denominator. If you use a variable width font, your mail may look fine in your mail reader, but be almost unreadable in your recipient's.
10. If you use Gnu Privacy Guard (GPG) or Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), post your public key to a key server. Then people will be able to verify your signature and/or decrypt your email without having to manually import your key.
  
  This is a courtesy particularly to those people who have their email readers set up to automatically import keys as needed. The time to get a key is much less than the time spent when the request fails.
11. On lists and newsgroups:
  1. Please stick to the topic at hand. For example, unless you are on a list for jokes, do not put jokes on a list. The more traffic a list generates, the ruder this is for two reasons:
    1. You will annoy more people.
    2. More people will respond, usually negatively, further burdening the readers.
    There may be a related list or newsgroup where your query is more appropriate. Post it there; you are more likely to get an answer.
  2. Flagging a subject as OT (Off Topic) is an admission that you know the message is off topic. If you know it is off topic, why are you posting it?
  3. Check the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) and the archive to see if anyone else has asked a similar question, and what results that person got. This is usually faster than asking. If the question has already been answered, all that asking will do is annoy people, so you may not get an answer.
  4. When you join a list, you may get an email from the list manager software describing how to manage your list membership, including how to unsubscribe. Save this email. It will save you from the embarrassment of asking later on, "How do I unsubscribe?" Similarly for the occasional informational mailings many lists send out.
  5. The first time you post to a list, you may not get your email back from the server immediately. This may be because the server is slow (I've been on lists with up to 24 hour latency). It may also be because by default the server is set up not to send your messages to you. Before reposting, check the list archive. If there isn't one, check with the list owner privately.
  6. Many lists programs insert one or more headers into each piece of email which convey information about the list. This information may include how to subscribe or unsubscribe, where the list archive is located and other useful information. Check those headers before asking questions about the list. For example, some lists at RedHat.com add something like the following to each email:
```
List-Help: <mailto:fedora-test-list-request@redhat.com?subject=help>
List-Post: <mailto:fedora-test-list@redhat.com>
List-Subscribe: <http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-test-list>,
        <mailto:fedora-test-list-request@redhat.com?subject=subscribe>
List-Id: For testers of Red Hat Linux beta releases <fedora-test-list.redhat.com>
List-Unsubscribe: <http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-test-list>,
        <mailto:fedora-test-list-request@redhat.com?subject=unsubscribe>
List-Archive: <http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/>
```
  7. When starting a new subject, please do not reply to an existing email and change the subject line. This is called "hijacking" a thread. The reason is that many mail readers track replies by an identifier number in the email, not the subject line. The result is that your email will appear to be a reply to an existing thread, and some readers may not be interested in that thread. They won't be interested in your email. Worse, some people "fold" or "collapse" threads, making only the first message visible. Those folks will never see your email.
    
    Instead, simply start a new email to the list address.
    
    Most mail readers will let you create an alias (which associates a name or other mnemonic with an email address). Create one for the list. Once you've done that, using the alias will be easier than relying to an existing email because you won't have to remove the message to which you are "replying" from your email.
  8. Pick your subject carefully. Many people will determine whether to read your email based entirely on the subject. It should be specific and describe your problem succinctly.
    
    "HELP ME!" and "How do I fix this?" are worse than useless. They marks you as a newbie. "Help with X" where "X" is the subject of the list is similarly useless.
    
    Describe your problem briefly. On the Frammis list, "Frammis segfaults" doesn't help. Instead, "Seg fault when using Foo feature of Frammis" is more specific, and helps readers to narrow down where the problem may lie.
  9. For the same reasons, when you get the list in digest form, edit the subject line of the list you are replying to into your subject. "re: Digest Night of January 16th" isn't very specific. Or use a mail reader that will "burst" digests into their component emails for you, like Emacs's rmail mode.
    
    Some lists make their digests available in MIME form. MIME format allows you to get the subject and threading right.
  10. When replying to a question on a technical list, show exactly the results you got. For example, if you are on a Linux list trying to debug a partitioning issue, and someone asks if a partition exists, don't just say, "yes", run "fdisk -l" and show that it exists, how large it is, etc. That can lead to a diagnosis where a simple yes or no does not.
  11. Take personal correspondence off-list. The only thing saving you from potential embarrassment is that no-one wants to read it.
  12. Don't use all capitals in your emails. IT IS CONSIDERED SHOUTING. Also, anti-spam software looks for it, so it increases the chance that your email will be tagged as spam.
12. Be sure to apply your "tact filters" bi-directionally.
13. Last, and I wish I didn't have to say it: grammar, spelling and punctuation matter. You are trying to communicate, and if you cannot (or will not) spell, puctuate, or write grammatically, you will not communicate.

Format	Size (Bytes)
GIF	356,388
TIFF	315,346
PNG	64,357
JPEG	18,336

Netiquette

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