nanog mailing list archives

Re: 202212160543.AYC Re: eMail Conventions


From: Brielle <bruns () 2mbit com>
Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2022 08:46:02 -0700

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 () 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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