Die FAQ zur MAUS Freiburg

Andere wichtige FAQs und Hinweise


RFC 1855 - eine Netiquette



One-to-One Communication
- Unless you have your own Internet access through an Internet
provider, be sure to check with your employer about ownership of
electronic mail. Laws about the ownership of electronic mail vary from
place to place.
- Unless you are using an encryption device (hardware or software),
you should assume that mail on the Internet is not secure. Never put
in a mail message anything you would not put on a postcard.
- Respect the copyright on material that you reproduce. Almost
every country has copyright laws.
- If you are forwarding or re-posting a message you've received, do
not change the wording. If the message was a personal message to you
and you are re-posting to a group, you should ask permission first.
You may shorten the message and quote only relevant parts, but be sure
you give proper attribution.
- Never send chain letters via electronic mail. Chain letters are
forbidden on the Internet. Your network privileges will be revoked.
Notify your local system administrator if your ever receive one.
- A good rule of thumb: Be conservative in what you send and
liberal in what you receive. You should not send heated messages (we
call these "flames") even if you are provoked. On the other
hand, you shouldn't be surprised if you get flamed and it's prudent
not to respond to flames.
- In general, it's a good idea to at least check all your mail
subjects before responding to a message. Sometimes a person who asks
you for help (or clarification) will send another message which
effectively says "Never Mind". Also make sure that any
message you respond to was directed to you. You might be cc:ed rather
than the primary recipient.
- Make things easy for the recipient. Many mailers strip header
information which includes your return address. In order to ensure
that people know who you are, be sure to include a line or two at the
end of your message with contact information. You can create this file
ahead of time and add it to the end of your messages. (Some mailers do
this automatically.) In Internet parlance, this is known as a
".sig" or "signature" file. Your .sig file takes
the place of your business card. (And you can have more than one to
apply in different circumstances.)
- Be careful when addressing mail. There are addresses which may go
to a group but the address looks like it is just one person. Know to
whom you are sending.
- Watch cc's when replying. Don't continue to include people if the
messages have become a 2-way conversation.
- In general, most people who use the Internet don't have time to
answer general questions about the Internet and its workings. Don't
send unsolicited mail asking for information to people whose names you
might have seen in RFCs or on mailing lists.
- Remember that people with whom you communicate are located across
the globe. If you send a message to which you want an immediate
response, the person receiving it might be at home asleep when it
arrives. Give them a chance to wake up, come to work, and login before
assuming the mail didn't arrive or that they don't care.
- Verify all addresses before initiating long or personal
discourse. It's also a good practice to include the word
"Long" in the subject header so the recipient knows the
message will take time to read and respond to. Over 100 lines is
considered "long".
- Know whom to contact for help. Usually you will have resources
close at hand. Check locally for people who can help you with software
and system problems. Also, know whom to go to if you receive anything
questionable or illegal. Most sites also have "Postmaster"
aliased to a knowledgeable user, so you can send mail to this address
to get help with mail.
- Remember that the recipient is a human being whose culture,
language, and humor have different points of reference from your own.
Remember that date formats, measurements, and idioms may not travel
well. Be especially careful with sarcasm.
- Use mixed case. UPPER CASE LOOKS AS IF YOU'RE SHOUTING.
- Use symbols for emphasis. That *is* what I meant. Use underscores
for underlining. _War and Peace_ is my favorite book.
- Use smileys to indicate tone of voice, but use them sparingly.
:-) is an example of a smiley (Look sideways). Don't assume that the
inclusion of a smiley will make the recipient happy with what you say
or wipe out an otherwise insulting comment.
- Wait overnight to send emotional responses to messages. If you
have really strong feelings about a subject, indicate it via FLAME
ON/OFF enclosures. For example: FLAME ON: This type of argument is not
worth the bandwidth it takes to send it. It's illogical and poorly
reasoned. The rest of the world agrees with me. FLAME OFF
- Do not include control characters or non-ASCII attachments in
messages unless they are MIME attachments or unless your mailer
encodes these. If you send encoded messages make sure the recipient
can decode them.
- Be brief without being overly terse. When replying to a message,
include enough original material to be understood but no more. It is
extremely bad form to simply reply to a message by including all the
previous message: edit out all the irrelevant material.
- Limit line length to fewer than 65 characters and end a line with
a carriage return.
- Mail should have a subject heading which reflects the content of
the message.
- If you include a signature keep it short. Rule of thumb is no
longer than 4 lines. Remember that many people pay for connectivity by
the minute, and the longer your message is, the more they pay.
- Just as mail (today) may not be private, mail (and news) are
(today) subject to forgery and spoofing of various degrees of
detectability. Apply common sense "reality checks" before
assuming a message is valid.
- If you think the importance of a message justifies it,
immediately reply briefly to an e-mail message to let the sender know
you got it, even if you will send a longer reply later.
- "Reasonable" expectations for conduct via e-mail depend
on your relationship to a person and the context of the communication.
Norms learned in a particular e-mail environment may not apply in
general to your e-mail communication with people across the Internet.
Be careful with slang or local acronyms.
- The cost of delivering an e-mail message is, on the average, paid
about equally by the sender and the recipient (or their
organizations). This is unlike other media such as physical mail,
telephone, TV, or radio. Sending someone mail may also cost them in
other specific ways like network bandwidth, disk space or CPU usage.
This is a fundamental economic reason why unsolicited e-mail
advertising is unwelcome (and is forbidden in many contexts).
- Know how large a message you are sending. Including large files
such as Postscript files or programs may make your message so large
that it cannot be delivered or at least consumes excessive resources.
A good rule of thumb would be not to send a file larger than 50
Kilobytes. Consider file transfer as an alternative, or cutting the
file into smaller chunks and sending each as a separate message.
- Don't send large amounts of unsolicited information to people.
- If your mail system allows you to forward mail, beware the
dreaded forwarding loop. Be sure you haven't set up forwarding on
several hosts so that a message sent to you gets into an endless loop
from one computer to the next to the next.