The following cautionary remarks come from our friends at pednet, a majordomo mail-list for those interested in improving the conditions for walking and transport in human settlements.

Not surprisingly, pednet is a civil and friendly place, as those who walk are people who believe in the value of sharing public places. Most emails there are responses to others' posts in a certain "thread" (topic). Their members are told to avoid both the adulatory responses ("Great. Me, too!") and ad hominem attacks that refer to the motives of others. Nor do theyt appreciate reference to your own or others "qualifications": all people walk and probably all members of pednet are quite thoughtful and analytical about it.

Other guidelines to keep in mind:

• 1) Proof-read your submissions. The time you take is magnified 300-fold in time savings by readers in trying to understand your points.
• 2) Don't send very long messages, papers, or binary files to the list; rather, post a summary in straight text, offering to send to those requesting it the longer or coded document. Such requests should always be OFF-LIST (to the personal offering it, not the whole list). Another popular alternative is to point people to a website with your material.
• 3) If you feel yourself getting heated about what another has written, consider sending that to only that person, not the entire list. This keeps the recipient from feeling as defensive and possibly escalating the exchange into a conflagration.
• 4) When referring to research or statements, try to cite them, either a bibliographic or web reference.
• 5) In a reply, don't include the entire contents of the other's message, only the part you are commenting on. If your point is more general, consider only restating in summary point the comments of another (be careful to be accurate and not self-serving). Also, make sure you are replying to the correct party, the whole list (probably what your mail program will assume when you hit the "reply" button), or to the individual, which will require you to clip the sender's e-mail address before hitting "reply" and then pasting it in over the pednet address before starting to compose your reply. Remember, there is no feeling so "sinking" as when a personal message goes instead to 300 people.
• 6) After joining, don't post for a couple weeks, so that you can get a sense of the style of the list. Your first post might contain a short (one para.) introduction of yourself, but this is not required (when lists first start, introductions are the best way to get things started).
• 7) When passing on something from your word processor, please avoid the straight cut-and-paste approach, as you will bring non-standard characters and spacing with it, especially lines that are too long. Rather, change to courier 12-pitch type and then save it to ASCII format (*.txt), closing it, and then using the Notebook editor to bring it onto your screen again. Quickly proofread it for format, and then cut-and-paste it to your mail-program screen.

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