[lug] e-mail etiquette

[Tkil]

>>>>> "Kyle" == Kyle Moore <kmoore at mooreimages.com> writes:

Kyle> 1. Is it email or e-mail?

i tend to accept either.  looking at a message i just wrote,
apparently i use "e-mail" in outgoing.  most people who care about
this stuff seem to say that it's common enough to no longer need the
hyphen; i think i tend to use the hyphen, because that's how i say
it.  (without the hyphen, my quick parse is "em-ail", and i have to go
back and correct that.)

Kyle> 2. When quoting the original message in a reply is it correct to
Kyle>    put your message above or below this quoted content?

my preferred method (and i believe the jargon file mentions this as
being generally preferred) is this sort of "conversational" quoting:
neither above or below, but intermixed.  (also, it's very important to
only quote the relevant parts of the original message!)

Kyle> 3. What is the appropriate signature identifier? I understand
Kyle>    that some systems use "---" as an identifier that what comes
Kyle>    next is the signature.

the standard used to be two hyphens in the first two positions on the
line (preferably with nothing else on the same line).  this was
recognized by e.g. anonymizing gateways, which would strip out all
text after this marker.

this seems to have fallen into disuse.  (at the same time, i've mostly
given up on signature files, so it's less relevant for me than it used
to be.)

Kyle> 4. Is it web site, website or web-site?

the first two strike me as reasonable, the last is one i haven't seen
too often.  for what it's worth, google finds:

   web site   => 4.17M hits
   website    => 3.15M hits
   web-site   => 4.17M hits (oops, hyphen isn't significant!)

oh well, so much for that.  i'd probably lean towards the two-word
variant, simply due to parallels with "construction site", "home
site", and similar.

do recall the attitude suggested by the RFC authors:  be strict in
what you transmit, be liberal in what you accept.

t.