Episode: 1740
Title: HPR1740: Mailing List Etiquette
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1740/hpr1740.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 08:31:07

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This in HPR episode 1,740 entitled Mailing List etiquette, it is hosted by Dave Morris and
in about 46 minutes long, the summery, some advice about best practices on Mailing List.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com, get 15% discount on all shared hosting
with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15, better web hosting that's honest and fair
at AnanasThost.com.
Hello everyone, this is Dave Morris. My topic today is entitled Mailing List etiquette
and just to give you some context to start with in February this year, which is 2015, I
created a script to enhance the monthly community news show notes by adding a section to it,
which summarises the various discussions on the HPR mailing list over the last month.
My script processes the messages that it finds on the G main site, that's where we copy
our list messages and it formats them into threads and reports about each of the threads
how many messages are there and so forth. Now as I was writing this script, I noticed
that people were often making errors when they were applying to existing messages and
message threads and they were also making the mistakes when creating new threads on the
list and that motivated me to talk about avoiding doing that and also just some general
do's and don'ts of mailing list use which I thought might be helpful. So as usual, I've
got a short set of notes on the main HPR page and then that links to a larger set which is
much more comprehensive. In fact, the notes are quite long, my son checked them over for me
and he said, Dad, this is too long, you should put a summary in. So I did, there's a summary
of the key points in the document, really the do's and don'ts of it, there's a technical piece as
well which I haven't summarized so I hope you find that useful. You could stop at that if you really
wanted to, you just wanted to get the gist of it and not hear the details, read the details more
as a point. So let's start off with the definition of a thread. Thread is a collection of messages
relating to a subject. It's an old concept, goes back to a time before the internet and I remember
finding this concept in a use net news before we had email at all. Our university I worked at
was a great user of use net news back in those days and there were very strict rules about how
you conversed on news which stuck with me and I carried on into email. So in current mail systems
you tend to find the term conversation used as well as an alternative to thread, probably a little
bit more meaningful. But whatever you call it, it still boils down to a way of ordering messages
to show which ones are applied to another. In fact, if you think about it or as you
if you examine what's actually happening, it's a sort of tree-like structure where there's a route
of the tree which is first message and then branches which are the replies and replies to replies
and so on and so forth. Now many mail clients offer a threaded view of mail messages. I have been
using Thunderbird now for a fair number of years and because I'm a devian user it's called Ice Dove
some obscure reason and threading can be enabled on a perfolder basis. You don't have to see the
threaded view and but I think it does a lovely job. So I've included a picture in the notes
showing a view of a thread from the HPR mailing list. While I was researching this subject,
I found an add-on for Thunderbird which does another analysis of threads. It's called ThreadViz
has links to it in the show notes and it displays a graphic at the top of a message
giving quite a good I think anyway a good visualisation of what a thread is and how it's laid out
and who is responsible for which bit it's all coloured and got lines linking bits together.
So that's included in the picture as well just for your interest. So the thread that I've analysed
is the one from February the 12th this year where can can file and forward a message to the list
from an organisation called Cybery looking to see if we if we wanted to join in any cross-promotional
opportunities. Now hopefully you can see this and it renders okay for you. You'll see that the
thread is displayed in the Thunderbird pane and I've expanded it. There's a little triangle
to the left of the pane which when you click it opens up the whole thread and the thread
the messages are lined up one under the other with little lines connecting them to show which
ones are applied to what and the subject of each one is displayed and the sender and the times
on. I haven't included every every minute detail I've cut it trimmed it down somewhat. Anyway
hopefully you can you can get an idea of what the thread is and looks like. If you look there's
also the thread vis display in this image and I think it does a really nice job and it does an
extra thing that you don't get from Thunderbird which is it shows there's an initial message an
external message which starts the whole thread. What that was was a message was sent to Ken and Ken
forwarded it and the thread vis is aware of this and has indicated that there was an earlier message
which is not part of the HPR thread. It wasn't a message sent to the list. It does it with a little
gray box and all the others are colored circles connected with colored lines and the length of
the line I've switched that option on. The length of the line gives you an indication of the time
between one message and the next. You can see the see the messages if you just hover your mouse cursor
over the circle and you can click on it and it will take you to that message you view it in the
the normal viewing arrangement that you have on this male client. The only just to just to continue
with the thread vis thing in case you're interested in it. The only slight downside I've found
with it is that it uses the global search and indexer within Thunderbird and so you need to switch
that on. I switched it off in the past because my previous machine was not quite up to running it
doing lots of male indexing all the time. My new machine i7 with quite a lot of RAM does a fine
job so I hardly notice it but if you want to get into this you might want to bear that in mind.
Threadvis uses the global search and index thing database I assume it is to enable threading across
across folders which is I don't know if any many other things that do that. I don't know if you've
got lots of folders or indeed I assume lots of male accounts being viewed from the same
client. I don't have really investigated that but it's quite a nice concept. Next let's look at
how email threads actually work and we need to look a little bit into the structure of email
had what an email message is and so forth in order to do this. This structure is defined by an
internet specification known as an rfc request for comments and the one covering email is rfc
number 5322. The title is internet message format. Not suggesting you dig very deeply into these
but in case you ever need to know about the rfc's I've linked to them in the show notes. Now an email
message consists of two parts the header and the body. To be absolutely precise about it there's
actually another structure called the envelope in which the header and body are enclosed but that's
a thing that's used when the message is in transit and it's removed on delivery. So we don't want to
go into too much detail about this and there's many many many sources of information about the whole
process of how email works such as the Wikipedia article I've linked to. Anyway the message header
contains lines known as fields and these have the format of a name, name of the field,
followed by a colon, then a space and a value and the value can be any length pretty much.
Can actually run over several lines but there's a convention we have to indent the second line
and second and subsequent lines. The body part is the actual message content and that as you
probably know can vary in structure from just a simple load of text to a very arbitrarily complex
hierarchy of mind objects such as HTML, pictures, videos, audio, all these sorts of things
encoded as mind objects. Again there's a link to mind if you want to dig deeper more deeply. I
won't go into any more about that. So in the notes there's an example of some of the header fields
and I've actually extracted these from the first message in the thread that we were looking at
earlier in the picture. It's a message from Ken Fallon and it's to the HPR mailing list and the
subject is forward FWD colon cross-promotional opportunities. Now these headers, these particular
headers are used by the male client when displaying the message. Usually they're reformatted and
made nicer than the bare headers. So one of the key headers, header fields I should say
but it's important in terms of threading is the message ID field. Message ID is the name part is
message-hyphen ID and it's followed by a value that looks a bit like an email address but it isn't one
and it's a unique identifier. It's always got a less than greater sign around it and
it's not for human consumption, it's for machine readability so it's usually some long
string of gobbling yolk, hexadecimal values, whatever it is. It's meant to be globally unique
as much as that's possible to achieve so it should be there should be no other email that has
that ID on the planet. One of the funny things about the standards of email is that there's a huge
amount of flexibility sometimes to the point where you wonder why it was ever ever decided to be so
and one of the things there is that it's not mandatory to have a message ID field but if you don't
then lots of things fail. So my personal opinion is the email clients that don't generate a message
ID are broken. I don't know of any of hand but I won't be surprised if there are some out there
and the next two fields are called in reply to and references. In reply to is in hyphen reply hyphen
to and references as it sounds. So when an email client replies to a message it generates header fields
which refer back to the ancestors of the message. So the first message that's ever written on a
subject you can regard as the parent or the root of the tree depending on how you want to look at it
and the references or the in reply to refer back to that message as the parent.
The in reply to field normally contains a single value which just refers to the parent message
ID. The references field is a bit more complex and doesn't have to be there. In fact neither of these
have to be there although you can't be threatening if you don't get either but you can have either of them
it depends on how it's been implemented. The references is a list. When you first encounter
when I first encounter I thought oh gosh this is great. It will contain everything I need to know
about a thread but of course it doesn't and it can't I guess. It would get ridiculously long
if it contained everything but what it does contain it will contain the contents of the parent
messages references field if there is one and then it will be followed by the parent's message
ID field so it points to the parent and if the parent happened not to be the first in the chain
the parent will be pointing back to its parent so that will also be in the references and that might
be that might also have a parent which is pointed back to and so on. So you do have at least
some of a chain there that lets you follow back up the thread and in every case when I say a
pointer back to a message I'm talking about holding the message ID of the message. So I've given
an example a real example of references and in reply to fields on the message which immediately
followed the first message in the thread that we looked at earlier. Now something rather odd about
this one is a little unusual about this particular case and that's that in the references list
that there's not only a pointer to the first message in the thread there's also a pointer to
another message which has got a string of numbers and stuff followed by cyberauri.it so that's
the message that originally came in saying you might be interested in this which was then
forwarded to the list and so that gives you some clues to how the whole business of pointing to
an external message could be arranged. Cyberauri message is not on the list it's an external
message which is being referenced. I've actually put in the notes the relevant headers of the message
that Ken originally received which are cited in his forwarded message okay it's getting a bit
deep now we won't go too much deeper so so there's the question what's a thread then so you
you're probably and I've hinted already that an email message thread is the the structure that's
defined by the links that I've been talking about. For each message points to its ancestors
and the whole collection of messages formed a tree if you if you if you analyze it you say message A
is points back to message B etc etc then if you looked at it from a different point if you can say
well the children or at least the the the the sub thread that hangs from a given message
of these messages so you can actually build an actual tree structure in in your program which
which is capable of representing the relationships between all of these messages so I did this in
the script that I was mentioning and when I was researching more for this this talk I came across
a site written by a guy called Jamie Zuinsky where he was one of the authors of one of the early
Mozilla mail products and he talks a great length about how he implemented the threading algorithm
which is I found certainly quite interesting so as I say it's in I've used something like this which
I arrived at independently I should say that's probably garbage but no mind it works and it's also
in the G main software because it also does some quite nice threading I think that's as far as
I want to go with this now I can pretty sure that I'm heading off into the weeds here and you might
be less enthusiastic about all this than than I am so I'll I'll stop at this point and get on to
the the next subheading which is talking about list etiquette so you do find this referred to as
netiquette I think it's sort of internet etiquette is where that's come from but there's a bunch of
things that you're advised to do to to make the whole business of conversing via email work
properly and the main thing is I mean two two things are thread consistency and the other is
making sure that the sort of structure of the the body of the message citations and so forth
is all properly structured so if we look at the thread consistency and some do's and don'ts there
first point is when you come to reply to a message on a mailing list which is part of a thread
then you need to use reply we'll come on to some of the alternative things that people do which
which are not a good idea a bit later on but you should have a reply facility within your client
and it will definitely look at the message you're applying to use the headers and we'll set up
the in reply to and references headers appropriately in the message that's constructed if your
male client can't do this then it's broken I think I'd be fascinated to to hear about it maybe
you need to configure things I've never seen such a such a thing normally they come with this
feature built-in in my experience anyway or you need to throw it away and get something else which
works properly just as an aside you should pay attention to how you do the reply because you
might be misled by where the reply is actually going to so in the case of the HPR list the list
is not configured to make your client send its replies to the list so what will happen is if you
simply hit the plain reply button on some some clients they will try and send the reply to the
sender only yeah not include the list my email client this thunderbird i-stuff has got a reply
to list button on it and that sends to the list only a not to the sender which is probably the
best thing to do there's also another one which is reply to all which is which goes to the list
and to the sender or sender oh no yeah it'd be single sender but list and other people cc'd perhaps
I normally just reply back to the list unless I know that perhaps somebody's been included who's
not on the list for whatever reason I normally do the reply to list because I'm assuming that
people who are sending things to the list just want to get answers from the list they don't want
their own private answer as well because they've got to then have to file that somewhere as well
that's not always a valid assumption I have to say some people do prefer to keep the list
mail separate from private mail and they would see your reply to the list and to them as sort of both
so I don't work that way but there you go so the second point in the etiquette list is don't change
the subject line so it's a the point of the conversation or thread is that it's about a particular
subject and it's bad etiquette to change that subject field as you go I mean you're you can do it
your client and probably let you do it but it's not good practice to do it the only the only
odd case where it might be if if is if the first subject was misleading and you want to make it
clearer but the convention is to put the new subject line the new subject topic of the start of
that field and then in brackets usually square brackets put was followed by the original topic
so people can say oh look it's changed oh it's changed because that first topic was was not very
clear now it's clearer but probably best to avoid it if you possibly can now here's the next one
is don't try to start a new thread by replying to an old one this is a very common problem
mistake that's made somebody will come to the mailing list they'll see oh there's the last
message that came out right oh I want to send a message to the list and what they do is they just
open the last message hit reply and change the subject line now this is very bad etiquette it breaks
the threading process because there's a brand new topic just appeared in the same thread and it
also has it has consequences which can have consequences which which can be counterproductive
so I'm giving you example here which is that the consequences that is the the script that summarizes
the message threads the hpr community news will not see such a change of topic as a new thread
and what it does is it lists the thread topics and number of messages so if you have tried to
start a new thread by replying to an old one your message will be included in that existing thread
and it won't appear as a separate topic that's because it's not impossible to do that in the
the picture in the the first picture in the the notes you can see the existing thread is
towards the end the topic is changed to intro and outro and without changing to a brand new thread
so the subject of intro and outro doesn't appear in the community news notes for February
because of that so don't do that just if you need to start a new a new um
I mean just write a new message to the list certainly open up an existing message but create a
brand new message and copy the the address if you if you can't remember to what it is yourself
don't reply to it but another common mistake which I've headed don't start a new thread to
reply to an existing one people do tend to do a thing where they want to make a comment on
a message but what they do is they create a brand new message copy the subject from the the
existing one and then write their their addition their comment their their message that will not
be joined into the thread because as you probably hopefully got from the the the techie bit earlier
on the mail client will not because you're not using reply it will not pick up the the links to
to link it into the thread because you're not replying um so it will be an orphan message that's
dangling around all by itself now some thread analyzing systems do try hard to get around this
problem the strategies look for these orphaned messages which are determined from the fact that
their subject line is the same as an existing thread but they're not threaded then it joins
them into the thread at a appropriate position based on the timestamp the g main algorithm does
that so if you look at the threaded view of of hpr messages there you will find that it's sometimes
repaired stuff Jamie Zowinsky's system which he described does this as well by an orphaned message
refitting process and the the the hpr community news script all that i wrote also does this
but thunderbird doesn't when you you're looking at the threads and the display that i showed you
earlier if the subject line is changed you know even if it's not if it's just a small spelling
change or a capitalization change then no algorithm will will repair this none to my knowledge
anyway because there's there's all of the clues that would allow it to to do that are in the
subject line so if you break that then you can't even expect any repairs but the best thing
does not to do it in the first place the other issue that seems to hit the hpr list quite a lot is
digest messages don't reply to them many mailing list systems do offer a digest facility and the
idea is that if it's a very busy list it can be more convenient for people to receive a daily
message from the list where all of the messages since the last digest are all bunched together
and they do this on the basis of a time timing between the last digest or there's a counter which
look in the number of messages that are going through the list and when it reaches a threshold 50
say or something it will send send out a digest anyway the digest consists of all of these
messages bundled together into one individual message and you know it has its has its advantages
but i would suggest that it's probably the most useful where the list is very busy
or more to the point contains read-only material like newsletters or something like that
just to expand a little bit more on this digest business some mailing list systems including
the the mailman system that's used through the hpr list generate either plain text or
mime digests you can actually select which one you want in your own configuration the plain
text format conforms to an rfc rfc 1153 it's not that complex it's a great format for human
readability there's a sort of table of contents type bit followed by the the messages but the
messages have been severely hacked down to the the minimum the minimum headers and the the body
of the message and sometimes the the message has been trimmed down a lot if if the message is in
a mime format has got attachments or anything like that those won't be in the a digest usually
in this form but certainly all of the threading information is purged as the digest is created
the mime format is is different because it consists of the digest message is one message with
the summary in it of the messages to follow followed by a bunch of attachments and each
attachment is a mime encoded version of the messages that that have passed through the list
so each message is actually does have its full headers I believe the instances where I've seen
this that's certainly been the case I don't I haven't done a survey of what else is available
like that but I'm pretty certain that the algorithm is simply to pick up the message and stick it
into the digest as an attachment now that's actually potentially usable but again I have not come
across a male client which can do the right thing if you go to a digest you see the the messages in
it as if it's one message divided up into partitions if you say reply there's no way you can say I'd
like to reply to this message inside this message you just say reply and you would it means reply
to the message I'm currently reading that is the digest so I think that if a list is about
discussions like the hpr list is receiving digest is a problem if you ever want to reply to anything
because you can't reply to the individual messages within the digest and if you do it you will end
up with a completely unthreaded orphaned message which pretty much can't be re-threaded by the the
algorithm I was talking about earlier because the subject of the digest is hello I'm a digest
number 42 it doesn't how could it contain the subject of all of the however many messages within
so I would suggest that for a low traffic list like hpr it'd be better if you didn't subscribe to
the digest list just go for the the met one message at the time option if you do
subscribe to the digest list you're either going to have to avoid replying to anything or you're
going to have to construct messages by taking the digest and editing out the the information you need
and building a message that looks as close as possible to a reply to a message as you would have
created if you'd got the the straight message and then inject that into the system and hope that
the algorithms that that men the threads can do a job on you on what you've done I've actually seen
this written down as a as a strategy in some university where this must have been quite quite a
problem I haven't actually linked to that thing because I was yeah it just seemed so insane
personally but you may think otherwise so the next subheading here is since we've dealt
pretty much with what all I can say about threads the moment formatting the the reply is also an
issue it doesn't really affect the threading thing threadings all about using reply and so forth
to get the headers right but formatting the contents is also an issue when you're sending and
receiving messages on a mailing list I've referenced a Wikipedia article on the subject of posting
style which does go into quite a lot of depth more than I'm going into here many male clients do
offer an ability to do a fair bit of formatting on the original message when you're replying to it
and if that's available and usually it it's something you need to switch on at least in the
clients I've used then switch it on because it's it's really useful so the first piece of advice
under this heading is to quote the text that you're applying to it's it's regarded as bad etiquette
not to to mark the the original text and reply as a separate piece of text the thing that you're
applying to so normally you start this section of the message with a line that says something like
on date and time author wrote a date and time from the the original message the message you're
applying to and the author field is the the sender's name person you're applying to the text of the
original message then follows with a greater than sign and a space after in front of sorry each line
so I've got an example here I don't I can read it and convey anything useful now then if some
if a further person were to reply to that reply then a further header message would be put
introducing the the secondary reply actually be the tertiary reply and and followed by the the
thing that was in the previous message with the the greater than signs and the whole lot with
further greater than signs in front of it and the follow up text so it there's my description
doesn't do it just as hopefully you'll find the the actual thing itself looks looks better than
that most male clients will handle this for you to some reasonable degree the other factor is that
when you have this sort of original quote and then the supplementary quote and then you're about
to add your comment to that when you have that sort of structure then and you're viewing it
different male clients will give you all different types of add-ons and improvements and features
to to make it easier to read in the case of Thunderbird that I use myself there are add-ons which
will color the different levels of quote so it's easier to see you know that's the red one and
that's all together in a block and that's the blue one and so on and so forth and the one I tend
to use more than any other it collapses the quotes so the innermost quote is collapsed down with
a with a little plus sign beside it that you can click on to expand it and then the the thing
that wraps that is also collapsed down so that you can you can expand that and I've got an
example of that a bit later on in the in the notes might just make it a little clearer so the
next hint is to say to to tell you to trim the text that you're applying to so if you if the
first message was a hundred lines long and you want to reply to that and say something like
I disagree with this because blah blah blah then it's not necessary to leave the entire text
in for a start by it's beginning at the start of the thread and walking through it you will
see it anyway there's generally thought to be a good idea to leave some of it but more particularly
the bit that you're you're commenting on if there are salutations hello list and signatures at the
end and possibly a footer from the the mail system itself get them all out remove them all
the other thing you see from time to time is that people using pgp or gpg signatures will their
message will contain these you really need to remove them as well I often see these things being
left intact in a reply and it looks to the the mail client as if the reply is signed with the
originators signature which composes it enormously most mail clients to understand these types of
signatures will remove them anyway certainly I with with Thunderbird and the enigmail plugin that you
use to get to gpg signing an encryption these things are handled automatically so if your client
doesn't do this you seriously need to think of enhancing it or replacing it that would suggest
so the next the next and almost the last point is about top posting and this is if you don't
understand where it is is the practice of putting the reply before the text of the previous message
this is usually regarded as bad etiquette since it reverses the normal flow of conversation and
requires a message to be read from the bottom up so the first point is at the bottom of the message
the second that the reply to that is above it the reply to that is above that and so on and so forth
if and the worst case I would say is where there's there's a chain of replies and comments
in a message and there's been a bunch of different approaches to the way the replies formatted
some people would put the reply underneath the the original and some would put it on top
it can be extraordinarily difficult to to work out what the actual conversation was because of that
most male clients will offer the facility of positioning your text your reply after the original
text and if they do I mean Thunberg for example says do you want it before or after and select the
after I would suggest some people do feel that a top posted reply is more convenient because they
don't have to scroll past all the preceding material to read it but as I was saying before
using an email client which collapses and expands quotes a good compromise because everything but
the last part on an incoming message is collapsed and that reduces the the size and complexity of
the message as you're viewing it quite considerably in my screenshot shows a later message from the
hpr mailing list which is which came from Mike Ray in as a comment to to another message and you can see
the the thing he's commenting on is just one line with a plus and a blue bar alongside it if you
click the plus then it it opens up to the the full text that he's replying to and then the
history of life follows after that I haven't put it all in I've trimmed it down a moderate bit
I left the thread viz display in just because I thought it was rather it was another interesting
example of what it looks like I have to say though the subject of top posting is a controversial one
and it might well be in a state of flux when I was preparing this show I found a long long
discussion about the right way to apply to a mailing list on the mailman users mailing list that's
that's the mailman mailing list software I've been a subscriber to this list for many years because
I used to manage a mailman installation at the university I worked at you might want to have
to have a look for that there's some quite interesting discussions a few fair number of slightly
off topic things there but if if you're interested in this this whole issue have a look at that
because I thought that there were some very telling arguments in there one of the points that I
must imagine I maybe didn't know enough about was that many modern mail clients particularly on
phones and tablets are not using the the more standard posting style and going for top posting
in some cases people were citing instances where their mail clients did not let them edit the
the original reply in any way and certainly only allowed top posting I certainly experienced this
when I was working where when we installed installed Microsoft Mail Microsoft Outlook the posting
behavior that the that most people in the organization started to use was top posting and citing
everything all the so all of the attachments would whiz around and everybody's mailbox got
totally stuffed with these long repeated messages where where the the entirety was cited over and
over again and and that was largely down to Outlook I believe so my final point is to say use an
email client that can do the right thing as in the the Wikipedia article on posting style there's
the comment there that some mail clients aren't capable of following the the etiquette and this
is my comment Microsoft Outlook seems particularly challenged in this area so avoid it and anything
else that miss maves I do appreciate that this is not always possible however so it's a slightly
idealistic view anyway that's that's the end I hope I haven't come across as too ranty and
but I think these are some important points and in a communal setup like mailing list it's good
to conform and make world better for others okay that's it bye now
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