By Tony Greenwood

E-mail Netiquette Signatures Literally Millions upon millions of e-mails are being sent around the world every single day, Most have some sort of advertising added to the bottom of the message, ranging from a simple url advertising the senders home page, to an all out commercial advert. There are no rules to what your signature looks like, lets face it there are no rules as such on the Internet full stop, however there are unwritten rules, Netiquette that should be adhered to, for example your sig’ should be no more than four lines long, Six lines is acceptable if absolutely necessary, You have to remember that not everyone has a fast modem and super computer, there are people reading your mail with anything as low as a 2600 modem, 100 e-mails with extended sig’s and UK pay by the second accounts will not think kindly to the extra download. Unless you know for sure who is reading your e-mail then you should keep it clean, posting to a newsgroup or mailing list with an insulting signature will also get you in trouble. Quoting When replying to an e-mail or joining in a discussion on a mailing list for example, we usually quote some of the original text so others know what you are responding to, remember they may not read your mail the same day, or others may be responding as well, so good quoting makes for good reading, Never over quote, you should note simply quote a whole 50 or 100 line message and write something like I agree at the bottom, this is very poor Netiquette. Flaming If you are unlucky or silly enough to break the rules of netiquette then you will be flamed, this is to put simply being told off, If in a public forum then a whole bunch of people will flame you. Abbreviations You will receive and read e-mails that have abbreviations and you will wonder what they mean, there are some outlandish ones documented, however there are quite a few that most people use from day to day and you really should become accustomed to using these yourself, here is a quick guide to the most used:
BTW | By The Way
ROTFL | Roll Over The Floor Laughing
LOL | Laugh Out Loud
IIRC | If I Remember Correctly
IYKWIM | If You Know What I Mean
RTFM | Read The Flipping Manual (sorta!)
IMHO | In My Humble Opinion
AFAIK | As Far As I Know
TBH | To Be Honest
WWW | World Wide Web
HTH | Hope That Helps
OTOH | On The Other Hand
Happy or Sad? Because e-mail is made up of text, it is difficult to get your mood across. You could write a message with a smile on your face, but someone else could read it thinking you are upset, so we add what are called smilies, but they can be sad faces or puzzled expressions, they are all used to show how you are feeling, or to at least give the reader an idea of your mood,the smilies :) :-) as well as :( :-( should be self explanatory :), To wink we would use ;-) and 8-) is a man with glasses smiling, see how many others you can find while day to day e-mailing. Mailing Lists A mailing list is basically a large group of like minded people who can talk to each other without the rest of the world seeing, Once a mailing list has been set up, you then subscribe to the list if you are interested in the subject, others do the same and the list grows, You will all get the one e-mail address to post to, whenever you post to that address, everyone on the list will recieve a copy, If anyone wants to reply, they do so, not to you, but to the same list address and again, everyone on the list gets a copy. An added option would be to receive the list e-mails as a digest, One large email containing all the posts, maybe daily or weekly, Not all mailing lists offer this service, but most do. Subject Matter There are a lot of mailing lists for your average ATARI user to join, and of course many non-ATARI related, Some mailing lists are set up because there is no newsgroup to cover the subject in mind, or maybe it is too limited a subject to make public, Bad Mood the long standing Doom clone for the Falcon has a mailing list for example, STOS BASIC my preffered programming language has one dedicated to it, as does Hisoft BASIC and other programming groups, Most of us are not just interested in computers of course, Just about every football club in the land has there own list, Yes even my beloved Preston North End (PNE FC) have one, Indeed most subjects are covered, Lists are usualy not moderated, but there will be a list maintainer who will throw you off if your conduct becomes unbearable for the other list members, The ATARI emailer has a large selection to choose from, including Falcon specific lists, Mail Lists There is another sort of list, one that you can subscribe to, but you can not mail to, for example Floppyshop the long standing UK Public Domain library has a list of customers and they mail there catalogue updates straight to your inbox. E-Zines You can subscribe to electronic magazines such as the well known Silicon Times Reports that contains a decent size ATARI section A Comprehensive list of ATARI related mailing lists, Including the ones mentioned in this article, complete with subscription instruction can be found on the WWW at the following url that is part of the ELYSIUM Links pages: http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/aseabrook/a_mlists.htm