5 \___|\___/|_| \_\_____|
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
23 2.3 Use a Sensible Subject
25 2.5 HTML is not for mails
28 2.8 Please Tell Us How You Solved The Problem!
30 ==============================================================================
36 The mailing lists we have are all listed and described at
37 https://curl.haxx.se/mail/
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.
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.
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.
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
56 1.3 Do Not Mail a Single Individual
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.
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.
68 1.4 Subscription Required
70 All curl mailing lists require that you are subscribed to allow a mail to go
71 through to all the subscribers.
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.
77 The reason for this unfortunate and strict subscription policy is of course
78 to stop spam from pestering the lists.
80 1.5 Moderation of new posters
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.
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.
92 The reason for this moderation policy is that we do suffer from spammers who
93 actually subscribe and send spam to our lists.
95 1.6 Handling trolls and spam
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.
101 Troll - "someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages
102 in an online community"
104 Spam - "use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk
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.
114 Don't feed the trolls!
116 1.7 How to unsubscribe
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.
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.
127 You NEVER EVER email the mailing list requesting someone else to take you off
130 1.8 I posted, now what?
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
166 1.9 Your emails are public
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
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.
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.
182 This public nature of the curl mailing lists makes automaticly inserted mail
183 footers about mails being "private" or "only meant for the receipient" or
184 similar even more silly than usual. Because they are absolutely not private
185 when sent to a public mailing list.
190 2.1 Reply or New Mail
192 Please do not reply to an existing message as a short-cut to post a message
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.
200 2.2 Reply to the List
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
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.
210 2.3 Use a Sensible Subject
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.
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.
223 This is why top posting is so bad (in top posting order):
225 A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
226 Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
228 Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
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.
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
241 When most of the quotes have been removed and you've added your own words,
244 2.5 HTML is not for mails
246 Please switch off those HTML encoded messages. You can mail all those funny
247 mails to your friends. We speak plain text mails.
251 Quote as little as possible. Just enough to provide the context you cannot
252 leave out. A lengthy description can be found here:
254 https://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html
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.
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
265 Cut off all mails and chatter that is not related to the mail you want to
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
271 2.8 Please Tell Us How You Solved The Problem!
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.
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!
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.