Avodah - Formatting Advice

Include your name and email address in the body of each email. A signature file would automate this for you.

If you want to post anonymously, have myself or another list member forward it for you. There is little weight given to ideas that no one is willing to put their name on. At least with forwarding, someone with a name is taking responsibility for appropriateness.

Also some emailers are unable to show the email address of the author when getting mail from a list. (The "from" line reads "Avodah".) So including that too can be helpful.

Try to only post in plain (ASCII) text. MIME and HTML look horrible when digested. The digest appends emails together. MajorDomo doesn't know how to combine various formats, so everything as treated as though it were plain text, whether it is or not.

Quote as much as necessary, no more and no less. Only include the part(s) of the individual email your responding to that make the point you are commenting on. Unless you feel it would violate dinei shemiras halashon, include information about who sent it and possibly when. (I understand accidentally forgetting to edit down the whole digest to the relevent text, but it can't be a habit.)

Try to keep lines less than 80 characters long. Not all mail readers do word-wrapping of long lines. The HTML version of the archives does not. (But should. Another item for my "to do" list.)

Try to keep the subject line meaningful. This will help future readers find your message in the archive. It will also help those who only skim their email (Areivim's volume is huge!) to follow a conversation.

By "meaningful" I mean either:
a- The same as the email you're replying to; or, if the topic drifted
b- Something clearly about the new topic.

Also, try to avoid metacharacters; those nice symbols like fancy open and close quotes, m-dashes and the like, which aren't part of ASCII. While they probably won't make your email unreadable, they are irritating to people whose emailers will map them to different symbols than those intended.