• Please include relevant text from the original message. Trim it to the minimum, but do not overdo it. It should still be possible for somebody who did not read the original message to understand what you are talking about.
  This is especially important for postings of the type "yes, I see this too", where the initial posting was dozens or hundreds of lines.

• If you have a new question, don't reply to an old post, but compose a new email. Otherwise the email will be appended to the thread you were replying to and not starting a new one (e.g., in the Wekalist Archives or if people display the emails as threads in their email client, like Thunderbird), which makes it really hard to find that message again.

• Do not post messages in HTML format, since the HTML format is not displayed correctly in the Wekalist Archives. The tags are displayed as well, which makes it really hard to read the posts.

• Use some technique to identify which text came from the original message, and which text you add. A common convention is to prepend "> " to the original message. Leaving white space after the "> " and leaving empty lines between your text and the original text both make the result more readable.

• Please ensure that the attributions of the text you are quoting is correct. People can become offended if you attribute words to them that they themselves did not write.

• If you are posting code or datasets, then please attach them to your post and do NOT paste them into your post. Most email programs break lines around that are too long. This makes it tedious for fixing files and getting them in the proper format.

• Please do not top post. By this, we mean that if you are replying to a message, please put your replies after the text that you copy in your reply.
  • A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.

  • Q: Why is top posting frowned upon?

• Acronyms should only be used for general phrases, like HTH for hope that helps. Otherwise it will make it hard to read the post. See the Cygwin acronym list for more information.

Based on the FreeBSD Mailing List Etiquette.