[H-GEN] Re: email signatures (was attached messages (was gmail won't let me talk tomyself.))
Stuart Longland
redhatter at gentoo.org
Tue Oct 4 00:59:06 EDT 2005
Replying inline -- I hope I've fixed my ways this time.
Greg Black wrote:
> On 2005-10-04, Stuart Longland wrote:
>
>>Ohh dear, we're not starting this argument up again are we? 6 lines is not
>>all that long -- many disclaimers are longer than that. (And yes, I'm aware
>>that the official guidelines say 4 -- as a rule of thumb. > 10 is yes,
>>excessively long, but 2 over isn't too bad)
>
> I think you may have misunderstood the point. Actually, there
> is more than one point.
Quite possible -- I tend to take things literally, this is just my
nature. I try to control this, but don't always succeed.
> First, this is not Usenet, so rules that applied there (such as
> the one you quoted above) don't apply in the same way to mailing
> lists.
Understood. :-)
> Second, even though you may manage to squeak in past the strict
> letter of the law with respect to some rule, when people on the
> list in question point out that your actions are questionable,
> then it's wise to stop and ask yourself if you want to become
> known as somebody who doesn't care about the conventions of the
> list. Think about how you'll be perceived by others, and adjust
> your behaviour to best fit in -- unless you don't care, of
> course.
Again, understood. Sometimes it's not clear where exactly the line is.
However, after a quick discussion on IRC, hopefully I've rectified this.
> Thirdly, there are many good sources of ideas about how to work
> with mailing lists, as Google can tell you. Here are some URLs
> that may prove helpful:
>
> http://www.gweep.ca/~edmonds/usenet/ml-etiquette.html
> http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=05386
> http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ia_nq.htm
I was working on RFC1855, which does cover mailing lists -- I try to
stick to these rules as much as possible, however my understanding of
these rules may not necessarily agree with others' understandings of the
same rules.
> In conclusion, signatures here really should be at most one or
> two lines and should eschew ASCII art.
I read 65 characters wide, 4 lines high -- and so I try to stay within
those limits. Mind you, what constitutes ASCII art varies.
I'll agree though, the signature in question (which I have fixed)
definately had lots of ASCII art in it.
> And, as I pointed out
> just the other day, if you must add a signature, at least get
> the formatting right. It starts with "-- " on a line by itself
> (i.e., hyphen, hyphen, space). This turns out to be in the
> realm of the very difficult when using in-line PGP signatures.
Yes, I'll have to figure out how to enable PGP/MIME in SquirrelMail.
This isn't a problem here at home, where I use Thunderbird.
(SquirrelMail can decode PGP/MIME messages, and can probably create them
too -- just haven't bothered to look that deeply)
> Since these messages hardly merit the extra noise of PGP sigs,
> the easiest way would be to drop the PGP sig. If you must use
> your informative sig and a PGP sig, then do the PGP part in the
> modern manner -- multipart messages are involved in this.
I digitally sign emails for anti-spam and verification purposes. I have
had my email addresses used in sending spam (and been flooded with
bounce messages as a result) in the past, but very few spammers are
willing to go to the trouble of faking a valid PGP sig -- making my
_actual_ emails very easy to spot.
Anyways, back to the question in point -- Is this better?
Regards,
--
Stuart Longland (a.k.a Redhatter) .'''.
Gentoo Linux/MIPS Cobalt and Docs Developer '.'` :
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .'.'
http://dev.gentoo.org/~redhatter :.'
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