Tim Chase pointed me to this. 1995! Netiquette! I’m going to copy out the bit about email (“mail”) so I have a copy here.
Some of this feels a smidge outdated, but most of it feels pretty right on 35 years later.
- 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
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RFC 1855 Netiquette Guidelines October 1995 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". Hambridge Informational [Page 3]
RFC 1855 Netiquette Guidelines October 1995 - 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. Hambridge Informational [Page 4]
RFC 1855 Netiquette Guidelines October 1995 - 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.