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| | Mailing List Etiquette
======================
[[introduction]]
== Introduction
Open source, community projects such as Git use a mailing list and email to
coordinate development and to submit patches for review. This article documents
the unspoken rules and etiquette for the proper way to send email to the
mailing list. What follows are considered best practices to follow.
If you are looking for details on how to submit a patch, that is documented
elsewhere in:
- `Documentation/SubmittingPatches`
- `Documentation/MyFirstContribution.txt`
[[proper-use-of-to-and-cc]]
== Proper Use of To and Cc
When starting a new email thread that is not directed at any specific person,
put the mailing list address in the "To:" field, otherwise address it to the
person and put the mailing list address in the "Cc:" field.
When replying to an email on the mailing list, put the person you are replying
to in the "To:" field and all other people in the thread in the "Cc:" field,
including the mailing list address.
Make sure to keep everyone involved in the "Cc:" field so that they do not have
to be subscribed to the mailing list to receive replies.
[[do-not-use-mail-followup-to]]
== Do Not Use Mail-Followup-To
When posting to the mailing list, your email client might add a
"Mail-Followup-To:" field which contains all of the recipients, including the
mailing list address, but not the sender's email address. This is intended to
prevent the sender from receiving replies twice, once from the replying person
and again from the mailing list.
This goes directly against the desired "To:" and "Cc:" etiquette (see "Proper
Use of To and Cc" above). Most users want to use "group reply" or "Reply to
all" in their mail client and create a reply email that is sent directly to
author of the email they are replying to with all other recipients, as well as
the mailing list address, in the "Cc:" field.
The proper thing to do is to never use the "Mail-Followup-To:" field as well as
disable honoring any "Mail-Followup-To:" fields in any emails you reply to.
Some email clients come with both enabled by default. Mutt is like this (see
Disable Mail-Followup-To in the Mutt section below).
[[enable-plain-text-mode]]
== Enable Plain Text Mode
Most email clients automatically reject mailing list email if it is not a
text/plain formatted email. For that reason, it is important that your email
client is set to create text/plain emails instead of text/enriched or
text/html email.
[[patches-that-receive-no-response]]
From Junio's notes from the maintainer:
> If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
> several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
> but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise. Please
> do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case. Messages
> getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
> your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
> right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
> becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.
[[send-merge-ready-patches-to-the-maintainer]]
== Send Merge-Ready Patches to the Maintainer
Once a patch has achieved consensus and all stakeholders are staisfied and
everything is ready for merging, then you send it to the maintainer: "To:
gitster@pobox.com".
[[mutt-config]]
== Mutt Config
This section has suggestions for how to set up Mutt to be polite.
[[known-mailing-lists]]
=== Known Mailing Lists
Mutt has the ability to change its behavior when replying to a mailing list. For
Mutt to know when an address is a mailing list, use the `subscribe` keyword in
your Mutt configuration:
**~/.muttrc:**
```
# tell Mutt about the Git mailing list
subscribe git@vger.kernel.org
```
[[reply-properly]]
=== Reply Properly
By default, Mutt uses the 'g' and 'L' hotkeys to execute a "group reply" or
"list reply" respectively. A "group reply" creates an email addressed to the
sender with all other recipients in the "Cc". A "list reply" starts an email
addressed only to the mailing list without anybody else as "Cc".
Per rule X, Y, and Z above, using "group reply" in Mutt is what you want to do.
[[disable-mail-followup-to]]
=== Disable Mail-Followup-To
By default, when replying to mailing lists, Mutt will automatically generate
"Mail-Followup-To" headers. To fix this, disable the generation of the header
in your Mutt configuration. It is also a good idea to disable honoring any
"Mail-Followup-To" headers so that any "group reply" operations are correctly
addressed.
**~/.muttrc:**
```
# disable Mail-Followup-To header
unset followup_to
# disable honoring Mail-Followup-To header
unset honor_followup_to
```
|