stanislav shalunov: Good Email Use

Sending messages in such a way that everybody can easily read, index, browse, and store them is a good goal to pursue. A checklist:

Reply feature

• (At least) two ways to reply: followup (reply-all) and individual reply (basic functionality, finally not a problem).
• Mail user agent pays no attention to Sender: and MAIL From: (envelope sender) when composing replies (these are machine-generated addresses; they are used for bounces and other delivery notices, not for replies).
• In-Reply-To: header is created and contains Message-ID: of the original (this helps to catch direct replies to your messages).
• References: is preserved (or created), and Message-ID: of the original is appended (this is required for threading to work and is especially important for mailing lists).
• Reply-To:, Mail-Reply-To:, and Mail-Followup-To: are to be honored.

Quoting

• It's not always necessary at all!
• Quoted text appears with a greater than sign in the beginning of each line.
• Quoting complete messages is usually unnecessary. If your recipient wants to read the message to which you are replying they can do just that. (Exception: adding recipients so that your reply will go to people who have not seen the original.) A few sentences to which you are writing a direct reply or simply a sentence or two to provide context is enough.
• If several sentences need to be quoted to make clear to what you're replying, but they are separated with text you don't wish to include, a common practice is to elide them by replacing them with an ellipsis in brackets.
• Answers to questions or concerns go after the (quoted) questions or concerns.
• Quoting signatures (unless replying to them) is not very considerate for the readers.

Format

• ASCII. Plain text.
• HTML isn't plain text.
• Sending both plain text and HTML is probably one of the most annoying abilities mail user agents give one. Resist the urge to use it.

Paragraph formatting

• Text is formatted to fit 80-column screen (for robustness, leave space for one or two levels of quoting without need of paragraph reformatting, too).
• This includes quotes (the fact that the original wasn't formatted properly is not an excuse).
• text/flowed is a typo. It should actually read text/flawed (MIME-hater insider joke; text/flowed is a way to indicate that text lacks line breaks).
• Alternating full lines and lines of one or two words are not fun to read, especially if the full lines are quoted and the short aren't.

Attachments

• Avoid, unless really necessary.
• If you can put stuff up on the web, do so and send just a URL.
• If it's confidential, include a dozen random characters in the file name. This is arguably better protection than sending it as an attachment anyway.
• If it can be said in plain text, please do so. This includes replacing 2MB Excel spreadsheet with a dozen lines each containing five fields by the corresponding dozen lines of text (few hundred bytes, and immediately visible to the recipient).
• If you absolutely must use it, don't use proprietary formats. No PPT, no Excel, no Word, please. Please. Use text (or PDF, if you must), text (or CSV, if you must), text (or HTML, if you must) instead, respectively.

Subject:

• When originating a message, use a descriptive subject line (examples of bad ones: "a question", "software", none, etc.).
• When changing subject, change the subject line.
• Don't pollute it: Re: FW: [Fwd: Re: Re[2]: AW: Hello (fwd)] is a PITA to read. Don't add any of that funky stuff. Add a Re: in front when replying, if it's not already there.

Signature

• Append it separated by a line containing two dashes and a space. (A standard signature separator lets people hide all signatures if they don't wish to see them, and only look at signatures of people they don't know.)
• Make it fit into four lines (or less) shorter than 80 characters.
• VCARDs aren't signatures. They are attachments. Don't send them, for the sake of humanity.

How do I do all this?!

Mail user agents to avoid:

• Lotus Notes. (Absolute disaster, violates virtually every rule in the most bizarre fashion imaginable; actually, no: ways impossible to imagine are implemented, too.)
• Microsoft Outlook. (Surprisingly enough, it actually can be configured to do things right. But why not use a program that comes with sensible defaults?)
• Eudora. (Breaks threading; and it's much worse than just omitting References:--somehow it manages to insert messages in random places into the thread, puts your In-Reply-To: into its References:, etc.)
• cc:Mail. (I guess it was so broken, that even other cc:Mail users couldn't read messages sent by it without trouble. It seems I don't get any cc:Mail mutants in my mailbox anymore.)

An example of what happens when people use broken mail clients: RJ Atkinson, while complaining about an ITU document sent as a Word attachment, writes in message <5.1.0.14.2.20011207125204.00a03dc0@10.30.15.3> (sent CC public mailing list ietf@ietf.org), excerpt:

--=====================_9343662==_.ALT
Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"

<html>
At 11:18 07/12/01, Ostap Monkewich wrote:<br><br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=2>&lt;&lt;SDL
Demo Announcement.doc&gt;&gt; <br>
</font><br>
<font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=2 color="#0000FF">At IETF-52 in Salt
Lake City, </font></blockquote><br>
Sending email in fancy text, rather than plain-text,<br>
and sending proprietary format binary attachments<br>
(in this case MS-Word)...sigh.<br><br>
Those are two clear indicators that the sender of the email <br>
doesn't understand the IETF culture or have respect<br>
for those of us who live behind low-bandwidth links<br>
and don't happen to use the Microsoft applications...<br><br>
Email in text/plain format only would have gotten a lot<br>
better reception in a lot of folks' mailboxes.<br><br>
Ran<br><br>
</html>

--=====================_9343662==_.ALT--

Sensible mail user agents exist in numbers. On Windows or Macintosh, your best bet is likely to be Netscape (configure it to send plain text only, wrap at 72th column, always 8-bit, no vcard). On Unix, there are a lot of good choices, Mutt is probably the easiest to handle. (I use Gnus on Emacs.)

And then, don't use attachments and don't quote it all. That's about it.