[Buddha-l] Setting your e-mail to play nicely with buddha-l

[Richard Hayes]

On Aug 20, 2009, at 11:36 AM, jkirk wrote:

> Pleeeeeeeze, for the nth time: reference to who wrote this post
> on Davidson's lab goes to Steve Feite, not to me.

There are measures you could take to avoid misattributions. First,  
stay away from Dan Lusthaus. Second, get into the habit of trimming  
out the messages to which you are reponding, rather than keeping the  
message intact in its entirety. Third, set you e-mail client to that  
it treats quoted messages in a special way; the convention most often  
used is to have your e-mail software insert a great-than sign (">") at  
the beginning of every quoted line. Finally, if you would like people  
to refer to your name rather than your e-mail address, tell your email  
software what your name is, so that people who are reading messages  
like mine will see "On Aug 20, 2009, at 11:36 AM, Joanna Kirkpatrick  
wrote:" rather than "On Aug 20, 2009, at 11:36 AM, jkirk wrote:" Most  
people use a formula for what is written at the top of a message to  
which they are responding, and the usual formula is to take the name  
of that person, and, if no name is available, then most e-mail  
software takes the part of the e-mail address to the left of the "@"  
as a substitute for a name.

Oh, and one other little courtesy to cultivate on an e-mail forum is  
to make sure the subject line names the subject of what one is  
responding to, not the Volume number of the daily digest in which the  
message is contained. (This is directed at those of you who receive  
all the day's messages in one horrendous furball rather than receiving  
all the individual messages.)

While we're giving gratuitous advice, consider training your e-mail  
software to send out plain text (aka ASCII) messages without HTML (aka  
Rich Text) formatting commands when sending mail to buddha-l. Some e- 
mail services have no way of doing this, but most do.

Retraining your e-mail software is much easier than herding the more  
than 400 buddha-l cats.

rhayes