202212160543.AYC Re: eMail Conventions

Fri Dec 16 15:05:21 UTC 2022

Dear Bill, Et al.:

0)  Ever since I signed up to the NANOG List, I have been getting 
complaints about my eMail style, format, etc. Since I could not find any 
document that clearly stated the guidelines and no one cared about 
providing an explicit lead, it has been a very frustrating experience. 
As I explained previously, my best understanding of an eMail is that it 
is an electronic equivalent of the traditional postal letter. We should 
start from following the old business correspondence protocol and then 
enhance it by taking advantage of the available electronic facility. 
Beyond that, an eMail is a literary work from an individual writer's own 
"creativity". A receiver can do anything possible about handling an 
eMail, but should refrain from imposing "rules" to the writer, unless 
there is a mutual consent. From time to time in the past, I did get 
questions from various contacts about what was I doing. Upon describing 
my rationales, most accepted them. Some even started to mimic my 
approaches. However, feedback on this List was exceptionally strong, it 
was quite distracting. Thus, I tried my best to minimize the rough 
spots, so that we could carry on the technical discussions.

1)  "On 2022-12-01 23:54, nanog wrote: ...  1) Your emails do not 
conform to the list standards (changing subject lines with every reply 
making it impossible to digest or follow.) ...   ":

   The above from you was the most recent feedback that I got. It 
stirred up my curiosity on this topic again. Since I had some slack time 
during the past few days, I decided to look into the "threading". I have 
been using ThunderBird eMail client software ever since its 
introduction, but never bothered about using its Message Threads 
facility because my own subject line tagging technique seemed to be 
sufficient. After a bit of fiddling, I was able to get ThunderBird to 
display messages organized in threads. Below is one such example. As you 
can see, my practice of continuously prefixing timestamps to the 
"Subject" line of messages in a thread seems to conform to ThunderBird's 
mechanism! Now, I would appreciate very much to see an example of how 
your eMail system handles the message threads. So that we can compare 
notes. Thanks,

Q. E. D.

Happy Holidays!

Abe (2022-12-16 10:04 EST)

-- 
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
www.avast.com