To FootThis is derived from my news-use.htm, and the separation may not yet be complete. Read that as well. Many entries, for sub-topics shared with news, are held in About News-Posting.
IMHO, your E-mails will be better appreciated, and will be more likely to generate helpful responses, if you heed the following suggestions. Some are firmly RFC-based; others include my personal interpretations : please let me know of any errors.
See also my Personal Computer Tips and On Reading Web Pages.
A much more comprehensive reference than this page might be found among the many FAQs in the demon.answers newsgroup.
David Alex Lamb maintained a FAQ : Electronic Mail: Frequently Asked Questions - it may still be available somewhere.
The Acceptable Usage Policies of my service provider (Demon, U.K.) can be found via another page; formally, of course, they apply only to Demon customers, but their guidance should be generally applicable.
See also Abuse, and be warned.
There is a FAQ, "International E-mail Accessibility"; "This posting gives a list of country codes with email accessibility. It is helpful in finding-out if a country has easy access to email and internet facilities and is aimed at general email and internet users."
It is based on International Standard ISO 3166 Codes and is compiled by Dr. Olivier M.J. Crepin-Leblond <ocl@gih.nospam.com> (remove "nospam") of Global Information Highway Limited, London, UK.
Another list, by Dave Eastabrook of Elmbronze, is now at TLD. Yet another is on the site of the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency . See also at alldomains.
It should rarely be necessary to respond by both News and Mail, which imposes an unnecessary load on dial-up users. If you do choose to do so, state at the beginning of both responses that you have done so; mail is normally read before news, and the recipient can then decide in time whether to respond in one or both media. More in About News-Posting.
Before deciding to respond to an unexpected Mail item, especially one which appears to be inappropriate, it is wise to look at the full header of the item, to see what can be learnt about the originator.
When responding to a previous item, use your system's Reply facility; posting a new article with the same title would usually annoy most recipients. Change the title if the topic has really mutated enough to require it. Check where your reply is really going to.
In replies, CUT headers & signatures, PRUNE quotations, and preserve sequence.
That is to say, quote above each part of your reply as much of the earlier stuff as is needed to put the new material in context, but no more; most readers will be able to refer to the earlier message itself, if need be. Never write on the same line as a quotation, except in lists and notes; generally leave a wholly blank line between. Do not quote the header or the signature, unless it is relevant to do so.
Sending E-mail in multipart/alternative and/or HTML format is a waste of resources, and it is discourteous to do so, particularly to a dial-up user; it is a habit of American origin.
The same applies to sending in word-processor formats, unless the formatting is truly necessary and known to be acceptable to the recipient.
Unless you know that the recipient has better capabilities, Mail should be sent as plain ASCII text; for this, a simple rule is to use only those characters on a US PC keyboard (as UK, omitting Shift-3 and Shift-`). For the convenience of those using intelligent mail readers, do not claim in your header that you are using a less common character set than is needed to accommodate the characters you use. For example, claiming "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=x-user-defined" or "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=euc-kr" for an ASCII posting is an annoyance when Turnpike insists on pointing it out. "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii" is no problem.
In Microsoft Outlook Express, choose Tools, Options, Send; select Plain Text for News and E-mail. Seek similar controls in other systems.
See, in news:uk.answers, the regular "Configuring your news reader to post to uk.*", which applies more widely than its Subject indicates.
Ensure that the recipient will be able to cope with the format you choose, and is happy to do so. It is often wise to Zip before UUing.
Unless you know better, you can only rely on the characters in the ASCII-7 set (the U.S. keyboard set) being properly received. Do not mail encoded stuff; watch out for systems which MIME-encode some characters, so that for example "=" is sent as "=3D" and "£" as "=A3"; some readers will not decode this (quoted-printable) form for you.
If you have inadvertently saved text in that format, try my DEMIME program (improved, Jan 2002) in my programs directory.
In Mail (unless both ends are known to have better capability) avoid the "£" "œ" #163 &gbp &ukp £ #163; £ &gbp; &ukp; £ U.K. currency sign, which does not travel reliably; instead, use GBP, which is the ISO standard abbreviation. Likewise, use EUR for the Euro currency unit.
The <HEAD> of this Web page includes the line
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html;
charset=ISO-8859-1">.
Part of RFC822, a standard about E-mail :-
6.3. RESERVED ADDRESS
It often is necessary to send mail to a site, without knowing any of its valid addresses. For example, there may be mail system dysfunctions, or a user may wish to find out a person's correct address, at that site. This standard specifies a single, reserved mailbox address (local-part) which is to be valid at each site. Mail sent to that address is to be routed to a person responsible for the site's mail system or to a person with responsibility for general site operation. The name of the reserved local-part address is:Postmasterso that "Postmaster@domain" is required to be valid.
Note: This reserved local-part must be matched without sensitivity to alphabetic case, so that "POSTMASTER", "postmaster", and even "poStmASteR" is to be accepted.
Similarly, newsmaster@domain, webmaster@domain, and abuse@domain should generally be accepted.
When writing news and mail, it is courteous to include the correct date and time in your headers. It appears that almost all systems are set so that they locally display local civil time, with sufficient accuracy. However, the Net is an international system, and it is required that the headers indicate the international date and time.
This should be done by a line such as
Date: Fri, 14 Feb 1997 01:04:04 -0500
(Taken from a posting written in Georgia, USA, at about 6 a.m. GMT).
The last field indicates the difference between local time and UTC (~GMT); it should be negative for the Western Hemisphere and positive for the Eastern (with a bit of give and take for such as Iceland, the British Isles, Portugal, West Africa, and for Summer Time, which adds +0100). Some abbreviations such as PST are acceptable; some are unreliable (MET? & BST, British Summer Time, also stands for Bering Standard Time). Some systems prefer to convert from the local time to GMT and label it as such.
Note :- Much software originates in the "U.K.-0800" Time Zone (centred on Vancouver) and is delivered so set. It seems that MANY users elsewhere are operating their systems with TZ U.K.-8 still set, though the clock setting is made to look right locally. This to me is a sign of incompetence.
However, some mail-services, being sited at U.K.-0800, put correct -0800-based timestamps for messages from anywhere.
The means of setting the Time Zone is system-dependent.
Note also that, while there is a consistent rule in the USA for the dates of Summer/Winter Time changes (and this may be built into US hardware/software), other countries use different dates. At present, the UK & EU Spring change is a week before that of the US, but the UK, EU, & US change on the same date in Autumn. The rules for the times of changes also vary.
The rules are often given by a DOS/UNIX Environment Variable - see Time Zone.
Modern education being what it is, one cannot expect universal literacy; I'm confining myself here to pointing out a few of the more frequent and glaring perpetrations by otherwise capable users of the Queen's English.
See alsu Jonathan McDowell's Spelling Flame Page.
| Wrong spelling | Right spelling |
|---|---|
| basicly | basically |
| consistant | consistent |
| definately | definitely |
| existance | existence |
| heirarchy | hierarchy |
| maintainance | maintenance |
| prolly | probably |
| publically | publicly |
| persue | pursue |
| seperate | separate |
| ... | ... |
| US spelling | UK spelling |
|---|---|
| center | centre |
| color | colour |
| gas | petrol |
| international | foreign |
| ... | ... |
Using a stream of adjectival nouns is confusing to many.
The "true meaning" entries are chosen to indicate the differences; they are not definitions.
| This → true meaning | That → true meaning |
|---|---|
| accept → receive | except → not including |
| affect → alter | effect → phenomenon |
| baited breath ; b. → enticing | bated breath; b. → retained |
| can not → possibly not | cannot, can't → not possibly |
| continuously → always | continually → often |
| enormity → wickedness | enormousness → vastness |
| ensure → make certain | insure → arrange insurance |
| expatriate → living abroad | ex-patriot → now-traitor |
| formally → correctly | formerly → previously |
| gamble → wager, bet | gambol → caper, frisk |
| it's → it is / it has | its → belonging to it |
| led (past tense) * | lead (present tense) * |
| lose → mislay | loose → set free |
| loth → reluctant | loathe → hate |
| no one → not a single | no-one → nobody |
| of → (preposition) | have → (verb) |
| practice → (noun) | practise → (verb) |
| principal → chief | principle → truth / rule |
| reins → horse controls | reigns → rules |
| stationary → immobile | stationery → paper |
| taught → educated | taut → tight |
| throws → chucks | throes → spasms |
| your → belonging to you | you're → you are |
| ... | ... |
| * : see dictionaries, etc.;
too much to explain here.
| |
Eschew catachresis!
Relying entirely on a spelling-checker is utter folly; it is enormously better to read, with care, what one is actually about to send, and to consider all aspects of its possible merit before launching it into the outer world.
Note : the Web includes two types of dictionary - those prepared by the producers of respected printed dictionaries, which list correctly-spelt words with legitimate variations, and others which list anything that might possibly be correct or popular.