202212160543.AYC Re: eMail Conventions

Fri Dec 16 15:58:02 UTC 2022

Hello Abe,

Actually there is a RFC describing Netiquette Guidelines from 1995 (rfc 1855), with guidelines still valid today.
See https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1855

Best regards,

Pim van Stam

> On 16 Dec 2022, at 16:05, 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)
> 
> -- 
> This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
> www.avast.com