SIG files
Hendrik
Dear partners in political/social activism and participants in public
discussion, dear friends:
I have been noticeing that SIGs (automatically appended signature files)
are becoming more popular and also seem to get longer, and now not only
private individuals but also mailing list programs attach them to messages.
In addition, there seesm to also nbe an increase in messages with embedded
HTML tags that are coming my way. Here are some ideas on how to cope and
how to make electronic communication more efficient and effective... (Since
this message is being sent to a larger number of key individuals and
mailing lists, i ask you to simply ignore anything that does not apply to
you - and some of you will surely find in the following confirmation of
their own ideas. In no way is this message meant to be an attack on anybody
- let's keep in mind that we are in this "eletronic world" together...)
In these times of electronic networking e-mail messages, news postings, and
web pages get widely quoted and redistributed, often in more than one step.
Due to time constraints or lack of technical expertise on part of
distributors, many forwarded messages contain lenghty headers or HTML tags
(this last option is supposedly a "feature" with some software). As SIGs
are becoming ubiquitous, i find that some messages in my in box contain
more lines of header and SIG information than actual message text itself.
In the hope that we all together can make life on mailing lists (whether
automated or manually administered) more pleasant, here are a few
"netiquette" suggestions (requests) that i hope will make our lives easier
(everything is open to discussion if you want - but please saend me your
comments privately):
Netiquette:
1) Please keep only useful header lines in a forwarded message.
The only header lines that are useful for proper referencing of a forwarded
message are "from", "date", and "subject". Such information as "Received
from" (followed by IP numbers, etc.), "X-Sender". "Message-ID", and the
like, makes scouting for the real information an unpleasant experience.
2a) If your mailer software permits this, and if the messages you
redistribute are going to the intended end users, you may want to employ
the "resend" command rather than the "forward" command. (This applies
mostly to administrators of manual mailing lists)
This not only keeps the "from" address of the *original sender* in the
header of the mesage, it also avoids adding those ">" characters that
quickly become a nuisance (at the latest when there are more than 2 of them
at the beginnig of each line of text).
2b) If the "resend" command is not available or if, for other reasons, it
is not a suitable choice, one can strip the incoming message of all
irrelevant information and create a short reference header at the top of
the text. This way there is also no need for ">" characters.
Example:
From: <bsi...@unixg.uguelph.ca>
via: <snic...@compuserve.com>
via: <prou...@coastnet.com>
[ followed by the message text ]
3) If there is the possibility that the origin of different parts of your
mailout becomes obscured, or if you quote selectively from a message, it
helps to "bracket" the quoted or forwarded text.
Example:
--- begin forwarded excerpt ---
[ excerpted message text follows ]
--- end of forwared excerpt ---
4) If you haven't got this already "on file", please avail yourself of
general "netiquette" information that deals with the use of ellipses
"[...]", spacing, SIGs, etc. (for example, the "netiquette" convention is
that a personal SIG be at most 4 lines long and clearly separated from the
adjacent message text).
5) For mailing list managers: subscription information can conveniently be
placed in the header (using a comment field prefaced with "X") - but do
subscribers to a mailing list really need that information?
6) There are a variety of other conventions and personal approaches that
make message distribution efficient and effective (and in acknowledging
that, i wish to make it clear that i do not assume that my approach is
necessarily always the best choice - but i may at least say that i know it
works reasonably well).
Your comments are, of course, welcome, but please send any follow-up to me
personally and not to the mailing list address. Thank you for your
indulgence.
In the hope of ongoing enjoyable communication toward a juster and kinder
world i remain with best regards:
Hendrik
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