The list below are specific to the lists.armlinux.org.uk mailing lists. Where they differ with respect to RFC1855, these points override those in RFC1855:
Messages which violate this etiquette point are automatically rejected.
See this popular news item for more information (as seen on linux-kernel by gregkh.)
If you are including the original message in your reply, always edit the message such that it only quotes the sections which are relevant to your reply. Don't just quote the whole of the message to which you're replying.
Also, please use a mail client which correctly includes References: and/or In-Reply-To: headers in email replies. These headers are what keeps threads together by indicating precisely which messages you are replying to, and the absence of them obfuscates the mailing list by making your reply appear to start a new thread of its own rather than being correctly associated with the message to which you replied. Some mail clients, in particular some configurations of Microsoft Outlook, are not standards-compliant and do not conform to the recommendations of RFC 2822. In the case of Outlook you may be able to work around the bug by switching to its 'Internet Email' mode.
If you reply to a message, avoid top-posting like this:
Thank you for your reply. Wouldn't it be a better idea to frobnicate foo? Bob -----Original Message----- From: Alice [mailto:alice@example.com] Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2005 8:47 PM To: Bob Cc: linux-arm-kernel Subject: Re: What is foo supposed to do? It's to make sure bar does not eat the gnats.
This is why top posting is so bad (as seen on linux-kernel by gregkh):
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?All this is pretty straight forward, and can be found in RFC 1855 - Netiquette Guidelines.
Choose one and only one list which is most appropriate for the subject of your message. Don't post to all the mailing lists you can find. rmk himself has a policy where, if he sees this happening, he will ignore both your posts.
As such, do not send any mail which furthers your commercial interests (job advertisements, advertisements for selling hardware or services, etc) to these lists. Such postings are off topic for mailing lists devoted to technical development issues.
Providing links to where patches for particular hardware platforms can be downloaded is acceptable though, although you are encouraged to seek the necessary permissions to post announcements for such to the linux-arm-announce list. In either case, your mail may contain your standard company signature/disclaimer, but must in no way appear to advertise your products or services.
Failure to comply with this requirement will result in immediate and permanent expulsion from the mailing lists of the email address and/or IP address, without warning. Further infringements of this requirement will result in the offenders companies the entire IP netblock being prevented from posting messages to the list.
This is important and must be complied with without any exception what so ever.
(the other solution is that the mailing lists are permanently closed down, which none of us want.)
Autoresponses should never be seen on the mailing list for many reasons.
Firstly, an automatic response should only ever be sent to the 'reverse-path' of the message which triggered the reply; the address to which bounces are expected. It should never be sent to the address taken from the From:, Reply-To: or other headers. In the case of mailing list traffic, the reverse-path is a different address which feeds directly to the list software; messages sent there will not reach the list.
Secondly, an automatic response should always be sent with an empty reverse-path of its own, just like a bounce. This is essential to avoid the potential for mail loops as autoresponders talk to each other. Failure to obey this simple rule is dangerous and could be reported as abuse to your ISP because it's a denial of service attack waiting to happen. The mailing list submission address is never used in a reverse-path of outgoing mail, and hence the list submission address is configured not to accept bounces.
Finally, the autoresponder should never send a report in reply to list traffic because the list messages themselves indicate that they are bulk mail. The autoresponder should check whether the message contains a Precedence: bulk or Precedence: list header and refrain from replying if such is found.
Note that the good old Berkeley "vacation" program does the right thing w.r.t. detecting mailing list messages, while certain other programs (most notably made by a company from Redmond, WA) fail to recognise mailing list messages.
You can get some guidance on setting up MS Outlook correctly.
See also the comment on automatic responses above. In the case of virus checking, no message should be sent to the apparent sender of the virus. It is almost unheard of nowadays for the sender address of a virus to actually bear any relation to the real sender, so by sending a virus 'warning' you are knowingly spamming a third party. Again, any instance of this reaching the mailing list may be reported as serious network abuse to your ISP.
People listed above: