Raj Mathur maintains a page on mailing list guidelines, which is used as a model policy at all Linux-India and Linux-Delhi mailing lists. The document contents is also mentioned here underneath.

*Note:* The text has been altered from the original thus - it has been wiki-formatted, and the various points reorganized into sections - SandipBhattacharya.

Mailing List Guidelines

These guidelines apply to most of the Linux-India, and some of the local ILUG mailing lists. Please follow them: repeated offences may result in the revocation of your posting privileges.

Do's

• Look up the ARCHIVES . Most of your questions have already been answered.
• Use plain text for messages. HTML messages are not acceptable. If you want to share a text file with the list, go ahead and post it if it's small (say, under 10Kb); if it's any larger, please put it up for HTTP/FTP download somewhere and send the URL to the list. Do NOT post binary attachments to the list under any circumstances.
• Be polite. Don't get personal. Don't use unacceptable language. Respect other people's freedom of choice of distributions/editors/e-mail clients/licenses. No one minds a little sense of humour though.
• Save bandwidth. When replying to posts, please snip off irrelevant parts of the original mail.
• Use good understandable english. U mite b 3l33t, bt there r other wayz 2 sho that.

Don'ts

• Don't post Offtopic messages. NO, we dont want to know if a really cool MP3 site with whole GNR collections is out there, or if the taste of Coke's changed again! Try being as close to Linux, GNU, Free Software and/or Open Source as you can be, and if the itch is irresistible, let it atleast have to do something with computers.
• Do not discuss any illegal activities (cracking/hacking, sharing cracks/serial numbers for commercial software, copying commercial software, passwords of accounts you are not supposed to have access to, etc) on the list. Doing so may result in your being banned from the list.
• Do not denigrate or display bigotry towards any particular community, group or country on the list.
• Do not append lengthy quasi-legal privacy messages to your posts -- these add no value to the message, and are quite meaningless in the context of a mailing list which is going to be archived and spidered by search engines anyway. If you use your office account to read the list mail and your office e-mail server automatically appends such messages to all mails passing through it, please get another e-mail address and use that to post to the list from.
• Avoid attaching your VCARD to each and every message you post to the list. Once may be fine; if you do it for each message it creates work for the list admin(s), who may then get mad (''Note: Some admins may even get mad the first time, so it's safer to avoid VCARD's altogether in general'').

Administrivia

• List Admins typically put their Admin hat on infrequently, but when they do, please listen. If an Admin decides something, it's final. Fini. The End. Tan-tan-taaraa. If you don't like it, start another list of your own, start an underground (or public) movement to get the admin overthrown, or hire a couple of goons to visit him/her at 4am and give him/her a few broken ones. Just do not dispute the decision on the list: it'll probably end up getting you banned for a nice long time.
• If in doubt, send a message to the List Admin(s) and ask. Don't mail them each time you can't decide whether blue socks go well with green trousers or not. However if you've thought the question over, searched the 'net and the list archives and still can't find an answer to your list-related question, do send the Admin(s) a message.

Commercial Postings

Commercial posts, job offerings etc. for anything having to do anything with Linux are acceptable, as long as you prefix [Commercial] in the subject line.

Some lists (e.g. the Linux-India lists) have a special list (linux-india-submit) dedicated for posting commercial information. Please make commercial submissions to the dedicated list; this will automatically cause your message to be sent to the primary lists if it is of relevance; it will also cause your offering to be displayed on the site web page if the webmaster determines that it is appropriate.

Additional Resources

Here are some resources on the Internet related to mailing lists which make interesting reading:

• Netiquette Guidelines: Minimum set of guidelines for Network Etiquette (Netiquette).
• The SPAM-L Mailing List FAQ: A comprehensive set of Frequently Asked (and Answered) Questions from the SPAM-L mailing list. Contains a lot of general information and a fair amount of demystification of mail and mailing list terminology.
• How To Ask Questions The Smart Way: In the world of hackers, the kind of answers you get to your technical questions depends as much on the way you ask the questions as on the difficulty of developing the answer. This guide will teach you how to ask questions in a way that is likely to get you a satisfactory answer.

Change Log

• SandipBhattacharya - 14 May 2008: Imported text from archive of lug-delhi.org, and changed formatting to twiki from moinmoin.