[General] On E-mail

[Ted Leung]

I've been meaning to write this message for several weeks, but things 
have been a little busy.  In any case, the content is just as applicable 
now as it was then.

I am sure that you've all noticed that we are doing a lot more in e-mail 
then we have done in the past.   This is a good thing -- I know that I 
personally am much more aware of what is happening in other part of the 
Chandler team, the issues that the PPD group is working on, iCal's 
problems with cosmo-demo, and prioritization of features for Scooby 0.2.  

However, many of us (including me) are finding it hard to keep up with 
the volume of all the e-mail.  I think that there are a few things that 
we could be doing to help each other keep the volume manageable.

1.  I've observed a lot of cross posting - the same message going to 2 
(or more) mailing lists.   If you happen to be subscribed to both 
mailing lists, then you end up reading that message twice, or filing it 
twice or some combination of both, which makes it hard to keep things 
straight.   I'm not sure how to address the cross posting problem other 
than to ask people to consider whether they really need to crosspost 
when they reply.   Yes, it means that senders need to edit To: and Cc: 
lines, but in mailing list environments such as ours, we ought to be 
optimizing for readers, not writers.   It may be that we might need some 
additional/more tightly focused mailing lists -- I'd be interested to 
know if people think that would help.

2.  Sometimes you'll see a one line reply in the middle of a long quoted 
message.   Please consider trimming the amount of quoted content when 
you reply.

3.  The design list has adopted a few good practices, that I wanted to 
expand on:
     a) The use of a weekly summary.   The weekly summary is really 
helpful if you want to know what's happening but get overwhelmed by all 
the thread detail.   I follow several other open source projects simply 
by reading the weekly summaries of their mailing lists.  I expect that 
others will do the same with us.
     b) The use of a [Last Call] tag.   The goal of using [Last Call] is 
to allow a reader to ignore the content of a thread until the Last Call 
tag appears.   Last Call indicates that a decision is about to be made, 
and now is the time for people who have comments to do so.   At that 
point, these "new" readers can decide if they need to read back through 
the thread to pick up the context or not.   This is a good practice 
because it can save other people lots of time.  Also, it's good because 
it's a way of signaling that a discussion has reached closure, as 
opposed to just petering out and winding up in limbo.

If people have other ideas or tips for keeping the mail load manageable, 
I would love to hear them.

Ted