Email List Guidelines

This page documents the guidelines for all CAN email lists. Our hosts, Riseup, have their own usage agreements.

General Agreement for all lists

General Behaviour

  • All emails should be on-topic for the list.
  • Personal abuse is not tolerated.
  • Contributions are expected to be constructive in tone and shy away from inflammatory language. We don’t want flame-wars and participating in them on our working lists is considered to be a serious abuse, no matter who started it.
  • Personal attacks or evidence free accusations of malicious intent on the part of those who disagree with you are considered abuses.
  • All subscribers must be respectful of the privacy of other subscribers. People have a right to have their choice of anonymity protected, except where threats to the security of the collective or collective members are encountered.
  • All subscribers must abide by these rules and the decisions of the list moderators.
  • These rules cover all of our mailing lists. Other rules may also be applied to individual lists.
  • We don’t discuss an issue over email once it is clear that it is a personal dispute. Our experience is that email is great for dispersing information but rubbish for resolving disputes. Face-to-face is the best option there. See the grievance process for details.

and maybe:

  • Promoting groups, or events put on by groups, we don’t want to work with. This specifically includes any political party.

Moderation & Dispute Resolution

  • If you feel that a contributor is breaking these guidelines, this should be brought up with the list moderators and NOT on the list itself. Even if you feel that another contributor is abusing the rules, that is not an excuse for you to respond in kind. If you can’t convince the moderators to agree with you, you’re just going to have to bite your lip and endure it.
  • If you disagree with a decision of a list moderator, you can appeal it to the list moderator working group. If you disagree with the decision of this working group, you just have to put up with it (or else propose to a meeting that they be instructed, rebuked or recalled for abusing their power).
  • Ignoring a moderator’s decision or the dispute resolution process is a serious abuse and likely to get you banned very quickly.

Sanctions

  • If a moderator feels that a contributor has broken the list guidelines, they can carry out any of the following actions:
  1. Send a private email to the person who has broken the guidelines, informing them of the guideline that they have broken and asking them to follow the guidelines in future. In the vast majority of cases, this should be the only action that moderators have to take as most subscribers will be happy to follow the guidelines and most breaches will be due to mistakes rather than malicious intent.
  2. Send a public email to the email list indicating that a subscriber has broken the guidelines and publicly rebuking the subscriber for doing so. This sanction will generally be used in situations where the moderators deem a particular person to have acted recklessly in relation to the guidelines. For example, launching a series of personal attacks or continually ignoring list guidelines could earn public rebukes.
  3. As our email list provider does not support putting individuals on moderation, the moderators may put the list on emergency moderation – this means that all posts to the list will have to be approved by a moderator before they are passed to the list. This sanction should be used when contributors have persistently transgressed the rules and have not heeded previous advice by moderators.
  4. Removing the offending individual from the list for a period – this should only be done to people who have a clear track record of recklessly abusing the list guidelines.
  5. Banning the offending individual permanently. This should only be used when individuals either consciously endanger the security of others or have a track record which shows clearly that they have no constructive interest in the project i.e. – proven trolls.
  • To take any of the last three actions, there should be consensus amongst the moderators (or at least those who can be contacted). The moderators should also report back to the next meeting about such actions.
  • In order to protect the list from spammers and hostile right wing trolls, the moderators can decide to apply a trial period for new subscribers to the list during which they can be put on moderation or banned quickly.
  • List moderators are also empowered to remove people from the list who aren’t part of the group any more.

Selection of list moderators

List moderators are appointed by CAN meetings to implement these agreements. They will be reappointed annually.

Best Practice Guidelines

The Best Practice Guidelines are just that – a best practice guide. You are not going to get into trouble for breaking these rules a bit, but if you try to improve your email writing over time the lists will be that bit more pleasant and productive.

  • Because there is such a volume of information on the Internet, many people have little time to read through emails. It helps tremendously if you format your emails according to a certain style, so that people can quickly and easily get to the point of it. If you don’t take the time to format your emails properly, everybody else will have to take the extra time to read them – that’s considered a bit selfish on the Internet, so proper formatting is just good manners. Also, if you don’t follow the standard format, others are less likely to read your mails. This document outlines some of the most important points for using the CAN mailing lists.
  • Remember there are a lot of subscribers on many of our lists. Many of them get a lot of mail and are unhappy when they get a lot of email that doesn’t have any relevance to their work on the list. Consider whether you really need to share your email with every one of them before you post.
  • When you reply to emails try to keep to the original topic of the thread, and don’t add in different unrelated topics – this helps subscribers who use threaded email clients to organise their email. If you want to bring up an unrelated topic, start a new thread.
  • Do not include the entire text of the original email in your reply. If you want to quote a previous email, just quote relevant extracts, in small chunks, and position your replies AFTER the quoted text. A good rule of thumb is that quoted material should never be more than half of the text in any email – remember the quoted stuff has already been seen by list subscribers.
  • Mails should be clear and comprehensible and as grammatically correct as possible.
  • Users are encouraged to send friendly private reminders to contributors who don’t live up to the best practice. It is only if the breaches are persistent that a moderator should be called on to intervene.
  • Everybody has the right to choose which mails to respond to. It is extremely rude to demand that others respond to your mail – they are perfectly capable of choosing what to respond to themselves.
  • In order to avoid flame wars users should generally not post more than three emails per day per subject. This guideline will be particularly enforced for off-topic, inflammatory, or repetitive mails.