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Table of Contents The Net is a finite resource. Any time you send anything to anyone, it travels through hundreds or thousands of computers, and gets stored in hundreds or thousands of computers, after which hundreds or thousands of people will download, read, print, and/or reply to it.
Saving bytes, just like saving electricity or recycling your trash, should be an automatic part of your daily life. Besides, have you ever been annoyed by the time delay it took to do something on the Net? Well, are you part of the problem, or the solution?
Please:
1. When you reply to a message, don't include the entire message: just a few sentences that will refresh people's memory on the specific point you want to address. If your mail program automatically includes the entire message in every reply, take the extra few seconds to delete the unneeded parts.
2. Don't post big, long, detailed descriptions of local events. 90+ percent of the people to whom you send it don't live in your area, so it's a waste of space to them. Just post a short notice, including a few highlights; and give an email address or other way for people to get the details if they want them.
3. (This one is minor compared to the other two, but I think it's worth mentioning.) Keep your signature lines short; I believe ten lines of text is (or was at one time) considered an unofficial standard. I know, it's a marvelous expression of your personality, or perhaps it's a political statement that you think is SOOO important that it deserves to be repeated like a mantra every chance you get. That may be OK for most email; but on a mailing list like this one, where you send frequent messages to the same small group of people, it gets pretty monotonous.
3a. If you use some fancy graphic in your signature, make sure it's narrow enough for everyone. If you used an 80-character width, your clever picture will look like garbage on a 79-character reader. And even some 80-character viewers will get in trouble if there is a non-word-break character in the 80th position.
3b. If you use non-standard characters in your signature, you're asking for trouble, as some mail readers will convert them to "=2c" or similar lovely stuff.
Thanks for listening.
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- Listserver Basics