(urth) Threadiquette

[Jeff Wilson]

On 1/7/2011 8:25 AM, Son of Witz wrote:
> On Jan 7, 2011, at 5:00 AM, António Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com
> <mailto:entonio at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>> Why not learn to use e-mail and write to the list in a sensible way?
>
> While we're getting nasty...
> How about all these multi-line adress signatures and favorite quotes
> that take up so much space. Who cares?
> I hate cutting those out all the time. Why put your signature on EVERY
> email?
> We've got your email address already. Save it for the occasional
> reminder, not every damn post, please.

The list software itself puts a footer on the bottom of every post, so 
there has to be a footer, regardless. The decades-old convention has 
been to limit sigs to three lines following the double-dash delimiter. 
The delimiter is there so that correctly-configured mail clients (also 
freely available for decades) cut the signature for you. Is my freedom 
to have a signature less important than your freedom to chose your 
e-mail provisioning?

A signature goes on every e-mail for the same reason a signature goes on 
every piece of correspondence, homework assignment, receipt, court 
order, memorandum, artwork, t-shirt, etc. because once they leave the 
writer's hands they cannot be expected to be encountered in any 
particular quantity or order, or with any particular currency. I am 
occasionally contacted regarding single or even fractional items found 
years later.

Singature also change from time to time, and allow the author to provide 
other means of contact that may not be so mercurial as e-mail. I am 
sorry if this seems like a burden, but it is one you implicitly agree to 
as part of the social contract of using e-mail on the internet.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >