Hi all,
I just published a blog entry [1]. Although I explained this topic a lot of times in the past I never wrote down the most basic principles of e-mail usage. Now I finally did it so I can point friends who are news in the Free Software community to this short guide. If you find it useful I will add it to wiki.fsfe.org.
Would you go to a job interview in your sweatpants? Would you sent your CV with handwritten corrections? If you answer those questions with no, you might also want to write professional e-mails. The Free Software community is a tough environment when it comes to e-mail usage. This short guide tries to help you that the community perceive you as a professional communicator.
- *Quotation* As a general rule: Do not quote the whole e-mail again, neither above your message, below or in the middle. Quote only the parts which are necessary. Use inline replying (for examples see Wikipedia’s article on posting style [2]) and trim messages if possible.
- *Subject* Choose a good meaningful subject line. “e-mail”, “help”, “hello”, or “questions” are not good subjects ;). When the topic of an e-mail changes, it helps to change the subject, too. Often it is beneficial to separated threads into different thread with different subjects.
- *Line break of e-mails* Should be around 72 characters. Nobody will kill you if it is 70 or 74 or even 76. But a lot of people will get angry if you do not have a line break at all.
- *E-Mail signature* Keep it small and simple. Signatures longer than five lines should be avoided. The separated for the signature is “– ” (minus minus blank) and then line break. The blank is important as many e-mail programs then know that it is a signature.
- *Mailinglists* Use list-reply. It is not necessary to include the sender in To: or Cc: if he is subscribed. If the e-mail programs are configured correct the sender will be Cc’ed if he is not subscribed or wishes to be Cc’ed.
- *Forwarding e-mails* When you forward e-mails try to give a short summary of the e-mail. Forwarding a huge e-mail thread to a list with only “FYI” will make you no friends.
- *General remark* The better you structure an e-mail and the better you present the content — the higher is the chance that people will read your e-mail.
If you like it you can also vote for it on fsdaily [3].
Looking forward to your comments, Matthias
1. http://blogs.fsfe.org/mk/?p=405 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style 3. http://www.fsdaily.com/Beginner/E_mail_usage_in_the_Free_Software_community