Re: [Tinycc-devel] What is your general workflow in answering to mailing list thread?

[Michael Matz]

Hello,

On Fri, 25 Dec 2020, Vaidas BoQsc wrote:

> What is the proper way to quote and reply in a Mailing List? Thanks.
> I just noticed that instead of replying, I created a new thread.

Thank you for asking.  Generally the usual netiquette rules should be 
obeyed, but we don't need to be too obsessive about them as the size of 
this list is small.  Googling for mailing list netiquette will give you 
various answers, from relaxed to much too strict, but commonalities would 
be:

a) No HTML-only mails (of possible without HTML content, but multi-part
   with non-html is okayish)
b) readable with mono-space font
c) no top-posting [1], no full-quoting if answering to only some parts,
   quote with '> ' prefixed lines
d) 72 characters line width

> As an average, I use in-browser Google Mail.
> Do I need a Mail Client to have a better experience with Mailing Lists?  

Ugh, let's hope this doesn't transform into a flame-war of 
best-email-clients ;)

gmail is probably the best in-browser client, but still fairly bad as far 
as mail clients go; I'm not sure how much of the badness can be configured 
away.  I'm not a GUI user myself, so can't really suggest anything from 
own experience, but reasonable mails seem to be produced by Thunderbird 
users.  If the settings allow to send text-only mails and a mono-space 
font and do quoting in classic '> bla' style it's going to be fine.

> Do you happen to do any manual message formatting work while replying?

(FWIW, I'm using alpine, and the only formatting I regularly use is to 
justify whole text paragraphs to the text width that they don't look too 
jiggly)


Ciao,
Michael.