On Fri, 2014-01-03 at 22:16 +1300, Chris Bannister wrote: It's absurd to open a thread about it. International mailing lists are used by people who aren't native speakers too. @ is often used in this way, so we non-native speakers adopt it. Everybody understands what it is used for, even if it's poor English. A correction, how to speak/write better English could be send off-list, since on this list the @-sign is seldom "misused" and even if it's (mis)used, the intention isn't to be impolite. You know that on the Debian user list it became a thread when an Australien native English speaker doesn't reply in Oxford English and even American English from time to time lead to a thread about wrong usage of the English language, with several replies that just add a smiley or +1. Are Linux mailing lists for Oxford English speaking poets? "Inherit The Wind" with Spencer Tracy does mention, that it's only important that we understand each other, the style how we use a language, resp. the words we used are less important. However, top posting is bad, I explained it off-list and sure, Robins explanation to the list is good, but any further discussions about the style, how to write emails is useless and only discourage users to join mailing lists. I dislike German journalists speaking bad German, e.g. when they say "Meter", while it should be "Metern", or when they claim that a "Fenster ist auf", instead of a "Fenster ist offen" but I also dislike when it becomes a thread in a German Linux forum, when somebody wrote "das" instead of "dass". The language police isn't aware what language is for. Language is used for communication, not to show how good or bad our education was. Feel free to reply off-list ;). Regards, Ralf