• What kind of messages are appropriate for the list?
• How do I manage the volume of messages?
• How do I use mail client rules to manage incoming mail?

Write a clear subject line

The first place to look is the subject line. If you want your message to be read by the people for whom it is relevant, a succinct subject line may save your message from being deleted without being read.

Note also that the actual subject matter of an online conversation may change over time. If you are following a message "thread" and the subject has changed along the way, go ahead and change the subject line to reflect what's actually being discussed. Even if some people may not have found the original topic interesting, you may reel some of them in by showing where the thread has drifted.

Quote previous messages
Most things don't make sense until they are put in context. If you are responding to a message someone wrote a few days ago, it helps everyone to know what you're talking about by referring to the original message.

It's usually not necessary to include the entire text of a message to which you are responding, though. Current list members will have already received the original message, and new members can look it up in the archive if they so desire.

Try to edit any non-pertinent text when replying to messages. If you are responding to a single line or paragraph of a longer message, quote the relevant text, but trim the remainder. You should leave enough of the base message to which you are replying so readers can understand where your are coming from, but there's no need to repeat the entire message.

How do you indicate that you are quoting? Everyone has a different style, but the point is simply to say WHO said something, and WHAT was said. Something like this is generally effective:

Zippy the Pinhead said:

  > Yow!
  > Are we having fun yet?

Begin with the attribution, then preface each line of the quoted material with some special characters. By convention, many people use the ">" symbol.

Don't send everything to the entire list
Some messages are meaningful only to particular people. For instance, if someone mentions a teacher at one of our former elementary schools, you may want to respond. That's fine; you should! But remember that not everyone on the list cares about Oak Creek, or Prass, or rosewood, or Croftshire, or ...

If you want to follow up to these more specialized topics, do so via private email. Try not to reflexively click "Reply" to every note you get, because that will send your new message to the entire list. Busy list members will appreciate your efforts to help manage the mail volume if you restrain yourself to sending only those messages to the list as a whole that are likely to interest everyone here.

Limit yourself
As new members continue to join, the list has the potential to generate still more mail traffic. That may not seem like much to some members, but others here are already wondering how to manage the flood - even to the point of leaving the list.

That may sound harsh, but we have to be realistic: at some point, if the volume of mail that doesn't interest us vastly outweighs the good stuff, members may decide that the signal-to-noise ratio here isn't worth the bother. I'll suggest some ways to cope with the mail volume in a moment, but first

If the list drives people away, we have a problem.

Avoid file attachments
As a rule, please do not send .gif, .bmp, .jpg, or any other type of graphic files to the list at large. Not everyone can download or open these files; similarly, not everyone has time to wait for them to download. If you have graphics files that you would like to share, please announce to the list that you have them, and take requests via private email. I know that this is more work for you, but the list as a whole needs NOT to have graphics files sent to it. Small files (under 30 kilobytes or so), are tolerable, but anything more should be uploaded to the files area.

Be nice
Please park your flamethrowers at the door! List members are expected to treat each other with the respect one would wish to be accorded in both PUBLIC AND PRIVATE mail. If you are known for stinging reparte in your brilliant oral conversations, remember that no one can see you smiling on the web. If you're making a joke, remember to use emoticons to help people understand.