080516nobattle

Subject: No Battles - Just Stand Firm On Best Practice Tags: life, software, web Date: Fri, 16 May 2008 08:52:52 +0100 Publish: 16 May 2008

"Here are three examples of rules that I think it's time to abandon. These particular examples are all about email.

1/ Top Posting [...]

2/ HTML Email [...]

3/ Reply-To On Mailing Lists [...]

So, yes, the barbarians are at the gate. The lunatics have taken over the asylum. Good ideas have been crushed by the number of people who don't understand them. But there's no point in complaining about it. You just have to accept it and move on."

-- Pointless Battles For Geeks, By Dave Cross

Unsurprisingly, given the above links to my site, I disagree with Dave Cross's conclusion, but I do agree with two aspects: battling is generally pointless and using hard rules about these things is unnecessary.

I have those pages on my website so that I can point to them when their broken emails aren't handled as expected. I use some aspects of them as scoring inputs in my mail filters. I don't use them as rules and I try not to complain about them too often.

Nevertheless, I still believe sending properly-trimmed plain text emails from a list-friendly email client is clearly best practice, to be recommended when someone asks why their email bad habits are causing them problems.