Good and Bad email: Measuring Bogosity

• Introduction
• Good things
• Bad things
• Cool things

Introduction

I have recieved many emails, subscribed to a couple of mailing lists and lurked in a couple of newsgroups for a little while now. I have conversed with those that have been in the business for a fair bit, those that run Linux and those that generally know their stuff. I've also conversed with those that are just starting out, or are simply talking out their arses.

There are a couple of things that really eat at me, some things that I see as good and bad practices in emails. I will respect that you know what you are talking about, or simply laugh at you, before I even read your email. Here I tell of what I see as good and bad things to be doing in emails in a non-ordered and unorganised fashion.

Also, please, I hope no one takes offense from this, I am just as much of a fool as you are.

Good things

The stuff that makes an email a good one.

• The email is in plain text and plain text only
• The signature is denoted by a dash-dash-space combo
• The spelling and grammar is good (a little ironic, I know)
• The subject tells of what is going on
• Replies are given under any relavant quoted text
• In-Reply-to: and References: headers are present where applicable
• Lines are wrapped at 70-75 characters
• URIs are not split over lines and where possible denoted by angle brackets
• Irrelavent quoted text isn't there
• Quotes are properly attributed

Bad things

Don't touch these with a barge pole.

• The email is sent using Microsoft or MSN software
• The email client wraps quoted text
• The previous email is quoted below the mail body
• The subject is meaningless
• The subject is not present
• The email is in HTML
• The email is in plain text and HTML
• There is a mention of HTML
• Text is not wrapped at all
• URIs split over lines
• URIs are mixed in with grammar
• Lazy typing (eg. m8, u r lzy)
• Quoted message is not trimmed
• In-Reply-to: header missing on replys
• In-Reply-to: header present on emails that aren't replies
• Signatures are not denoted
• Part of the message body after the signature denotor
• All caps
• All lowercase
• Quotes aren't attributed

Cool things

Well, they don't subtract or add to an email, but they definitly give you instant respect.

• Custom (funny) X headers
• You are Tim Berners-Lee

document created: 2002-04-17
document modified: 2002-04-19