1 Purpose of the list

The Jesus XL Group mailing list is for discussion of matters of common interest to Old Members of the College. Subscribers to the list send e-mail to XL@lists.jomg.org and this mail is distributed to all the other subscribers.

2 Behaviour

Imagine you are in Hall, eating and talking with others — the same rules apply on the list. If a mail has offended you personally, please send a private message to the person expressing how you feel, instead of sending it to the mailing list. You may also write to abuse@jomg.org . The list is not moderated. However if the complaint is upheld by the JOMG Committee, the offender will be warned and subject to moderation. Repeat offenders will be excluded from the list.

The XL membership secretary holds the database of all the XL members and their privacy requests. We verify with the Alumni Department the authenticity of any new member joining the XL Network through this website using name, subject and year of matriculation only.  We will check that any new mailing list subscriber is on the XL list of members or, if from a wider audience, we will ask College to confirm a Jesus College member using the subscription details.

3 Starting a New Subject

When you send in a new topic, do not start by replying to an existing message, but rather, start a new subject in your message to XL@lists.jomg.org.

This keeps messages organized by thread, for easy access in the archives, and helps people who use mail readers which can manage threads.

Please do not recycle messages. Recycling messages is replying to an existing thread by changing the thread name. This creates confusion and diverts the number of people replying to the topic. For details see here.

4 Replying to a Message

Make sure readers can tell what you are replying to. Although some commercial mailers place replies above the preceeding message, we recommend placing each part of your reply after the text it addresses i.e., NO Top-Posting, please see Wikipedia – Top Posting and links therein for more on this). Most mail readers automatically put a > character in front of each replied-to line. It gives a conversational flow to the text, and people know what you’re replying to. Trim irrelevant material. It makes it easier to read your reply and helps the reader to stay on subject. Using bottom, interleaved posting is recommended as it is more organised.

The fact that you’re sending the email from a smart-phone or similar device doesn’t invalidate those guidelines. Please consider sending the reply at a later time when you have access to your regular email system or send a private reply instead. Jesus XL Group members are patient, we will wait for your reply.

5 Keep it Short

The list maintains a maximum message length of 64 kilobytes. Remember that many copies of your message will exist in mailboxes — please keep your messages as short as possible. Please avoid excessively quoting previous messages in the thread. Trim the quoted text down to the most recent/relevant messages only.

6 Avoid long signatures and disclaimers

The value of your e-mail is in your main content rather than signatures. One or two lines would be optimal to convey messages that must be included in your signature. Please avoid huge disclaimers describing how your mail is private and confidential while sending things to the mailing list. If your company/organization enforces that in the mail gateway, use a webmail with pop/imap access like gmail for instance. Such disclaimers aren’t enforceable half of the time and are monumentally silly in a public mailing list.

7 No attachments

Attachments to email make the messages much bigger. They create an enormous amount of extra Internet traffic when a mailing list sends the message and attachments to many people worldwide. They also can create problems for the recipients, who may be limited to low-bandwidth connections. A reader may not know they are downloading an email with a very large attachment until it is too late, and they might be blocked from getting other mail until they finish that download, which makes them frustrated.

Don’t use attachments to your email. Instead, post the file on the web, and include a URL to that file in your email, not the file itself. Services offering this facility include Dropbox, Google Drive, WeTransfer, Send Anywhere, Hightail, MediaFire, Box and Slack.

8 Proper posting style = bottom, interleaved

Top posting is replying to a message on top of the quoted text of the previous correspondence. It is common in business correspondance to quote the entire previous conversation with every reply, but not needed in a mailing list since the archives are readily available and contain the entire conversation thread. Many users of technical mailing lists consider that top posting is highly confusing and incoherent. Unfortunately, by default, most email clients use this (including Gmail & Hotmail). Please, remove the irrelevant part of the previous communication and use bottom, interleaved posting.

Do not over-quote by the hierarchy level in the correspondence.

Bottom, interleaved posting is replying to the relevant parts of the previous correspondence just below the block(s) of sentences. For a comment to another block of sentences of the same quoted text, you should move below that relevant block again. Do not reply below the whole of the quoted text. Also remove any irrelevant text.

Please provide URLs to articles wherever possible. Avoid cutting and pasting whole articles especially considering the fact that all may not be interested. Pasting whole articles may also amount to copyright violations, which is not something that this list encourages.

Also read this which says these things clearly.

9 No HTML Mail

Please set your mailer to send only plain text messages to the list. How do I do that? Our message service has been set to convert HTML to plain text.

Why? HTML is designed for web pages, not emails, and uses a lot more bandwidth. Some list members actually block HTML because it is used for malicious code.

Not only can HTML mail be used to run malicious scripts, but when using handheld devices the time taken for the page to appear is also much higher.

See 7 reasons why HTML e-mail is EVIL!

10 Do not use a PGP Style Signature that is not published

Use of PGP or GnuPG signing is encouraged. However, if the corresponding key is not published on a public keyserver, then the message will cause some email client applications (MUAs) that are PGP/GPG aware to hang while they try all known keyservers. This can take a long time and cause frustration for other users. If you have a unpublished key or new key consider attaching said key (in .asc format) to the email thread.

11 Copyright

Subscribers to the mailing list retain the copyright of their e-mails. The Jesus XL Group does not exploit the list for commercial gain. The list is not indexed by Google or other such web-crawlers.