North American Network Operators Group

Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

E-mail addresses and signatures [was: RE: 96.0.0.0/6 reachability testing]

  • From: Steve Gibbard
  • Date: Fri May 04 15:22:23 2007


What follows is an off-topic meta-comment, so if you weren't following earlier stuff in this thread, you might as well stop reading. My apologies for furthering this.


On Wed, 2 May 2007 [email protected] wrote:


Warren Kumari wrote:
I don't think that Ron is choosing to put this .sig in his mail, some
ugly corporate mail gateway is probably appending it for him. While
he could spend a huge amount of time trying to explain to someone at
Time Warner that it is a stupid thing to do, I sure he has better
things to do...

I don't see anywhere in the NANOG charter that says we have to use our corporate email addresses in correspondence with list. From what I've seen, most of us don't. I agree 100% that trying to get $corporation to remove the useless and annoying .sig's is like tilting at windmills. But for the sanity and comfort of other list users, would it be too much to ask that people with annoying tacked-on .sig's use a personal mail account when posting to the list? I hear Google offers nice email accounts for a reasonable price.

At the risk of hypocracy as well as off-topicness, I'm rather hoping people don't follow this advice.


There are a few well-known people on this list whose employment situations and other affiliations don't need much explanation for anybody who has been following the industry closely. There are many more NANOG posters who aren't so well known. Some of these people post to the list a lot, often making assertions without evidence to back them up, and without enough information about who the poster is to figure out whether they're speaking from inside knowledge or relevant experience, whether they work for somebody with a strong stake in the issue under discussion, or or whether they are most likely just making stuff up.

I'd much rather see messages with .signatures full of legalese at the end (generally after I've stopped reading anyway), than messages sent with less information about the poster's identity.

I realize I'm following my own advice here, largely due not having changed my mailing list configurations after a period of unstable employment a few years ago.

-Steve Gibbard
Network Architect
Packet Clearing House
www.pch.net

Speaking for myself, not for my employer, and not for any NANOG-related committees I've been on in the past.