12. E-mail convention

When you exchange messages with other people, you should obey minimum manner. It gives a bad impression to the people if you violate the manner since such messages are hard to read. We always should try to write concise yet comprehensive explanations and make an effort to make receivers well-understood.

We should take good care of the following items.

Fill To: and Cc: fields precisely

To: is for target receivers and Cc: is for those who are received for their information. If his address is not on To:, he might skip to read the message. We should take care not to deliver to wrong people by mistaking the addresses.

The number of addresses To: and Cc: should be small

It is discouraged to specify a lot of mail addresses on To: and Cc:. You should create a mailing-list instead. Or, if necessary, you should make the destination anonymous (See section Sending messages with anonymous receivers).

Write a short and clear summary of body in Subject:

There are people who decide to read contents from their Subject:. So, they might skip messages with improper Subject:. We should not write a long subject since it is hard to read.

Carriage return means end of line and null line expresses end of paragraph. One line should be limited to 70 characters or so.

It is very hard to read if you write a message on every other line or in a long line without folding. Especially long lines are trouble to cite. Some people write a message with indent but it is meaningless. Text is displayed differently on each machines, so even if the layout is excellent on your machine, it might not be so on other machines.

Cite only necessary sentences

You should not bother to remove unnecessary sentences. With Mew, citation must be a piece of cake.

Make your signature simple

A long signature is just self-satisfaction.

Do not send prank messages

I do not want to warn this kind of stuff. Nonetheless, someone sends Happy or Unhappy messages to others. You should understand that people doubt your character.

Attach data files that the receivers can read

It is text only that you can send without any agreement with the receivers. If you want to send data files other than text, you should make an agreement with the receivers. To mailing-list, you should send text only.

If you wish to learn manner on the Internet more comprehensively, please refer to RFC1855.

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