[La-students] Bad Practices

[David Andrews]

Dear NFB List Users:

Over the past few weeks, Mike Freeman, Steve Jacobson and I, your faithful list watchers have noticed that people are doing a number of things in their messages that can, at a minimum be annoying, and at a maximum could bring spam or other harm to others.

First, it is important to remember that all our public lists have public archives, that is you can read your messages, and everybody elses from anywhere on the Internet.  They can also be searched, and located by Google and all other search engines.  So, what you say and do may be around forever.

If you are forwarding a message, please take the time to remove all the To: and other header lines, from repeated forwards.  If you are sending the message to one of our lists, and some of your friends, put their names in the BCC field so they aren't out there for the world to see.  Put the NFB list in the To: field though, as putting it in CC or BC causes it to be rejected as spam.

Please think seriously before you put an address or phone number in the subject or body of a message.  You may be opening up yourself, or somebody else to other kinds of abuse and harassment.  

Then of course all the other common sense things, change the subject to match the content, keep the quoted material to a minimum, if you are in Digest Mode, edit out as much as possible, don't flame, and threat each other -- and especially Steve, Mike and I with respect.

David Andrews, SysOp and List Owner