[Samba] Mailing list HOWTO (Unofficial)

[Jonathan Johnson]

A few tips when submitting to this or any mailing list. I may be
preaching to the choir, but some of you can't carry a tune.

1) Make your subject short and descriptive. Avoid the words "help" or
"Samba" in the subject. The readers of this list already know that a)
you need help, and b) you are writing about samba (of course, you may
need to distinguish between Samba PDC and other filesharing software).
Avoid phrases such as "what is" and "how do i". Some good subject lines
might look like "Slow response with Excel files" or "Migrating from
Samba PDC to NT PDC".

2) If you include the original message in your reply, trim it so that
only the relevant lines, enough to establish context, are included.
Chances are (since this is a mailing list) we've already read the
original message.

3) Trim irrelevant headers from the original message in your reply. All
we need to see is a) From, b) Date, and c) Subject. We don't even
really need the Subject, if you haven't changed it. Better yet is to
just preface the original message with "On [date] [someone] wrote:".

4) Never say "Me too." It doesn't help anyone solve the problem.
Instead, if you ARE having the same problem, give more information.
Have you seen something that the other writer hasn't mentioned, which
may be helpful?

5) If you ask about a problem, then come up with the solution on your
own or thru another source, by all means post it. Someone else may have
the same problem and is waiting for an answer, but never hears of it.

6) Give as much *relevant* information as possible.

7) RTFM. Google. groups.google.com.

--Jon
jon at sutinen.com

P.S. -- "Migrating from NT PDC to Samba PDC" might be a better subject
line. :-)