Re: 202212160543.AYC Re: eMail Conventions

[Pim van Stam <pim () vanstam-ict nl>]

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 () 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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