202212160543.AYC Re: eMail Conventions

Brielle bruns at 2mbit.com
Fri Dec 16 15:46:02 UTC 2022


If you are running thunderbird, all you need to do is hit Reply and respond accordingly, maybe trimming off some extra fluff at the end of the quoted message.

The defaults in Thunderbird are pretty ‘normal’ in terms of what the bulk of the world expects a message reply to be.  It handles quoting, adding the Re to the title, etc.

Your strange way of responding by purposely changing the subject and adding a time stamp, and no quoting or indication of the original message (ie ‘On X date at X time, Joe Smith wrote…’) with ‘1)’ is just excessive and designed to draw out the process needlessly.

Just use the standard Thunderbird reply function, hit Reply, and go!

I once told a drama queen (using her own words),

“Don’t tell me that you feel like you are on a journey with Ewoks to the fires of the molten core of andor or that your mind is drowning in excruciating sensory overload like what happened one evening 15 years ago when only you were present.

Just say, ‘my hand is numb’ and stop wasting 10 minutes of my time for what takes 4 words to say.”

This isn’t the place to do your artistic flowery email bullshit. We talk tech here.  There’s two common no BS ways to respond.

Sent from my iPhone

> On Dec 16, 2022, at 8:06 AM, Abraham Y. Chen <aychen at avinta.com> wrote:
> 
> 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)
> 
> -- 
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