I'll chime in with the others, and add another data point. It's from a
mailing list, which is on a .de host. So people in some parts of
Europe sometimes post without looking, and assume it's okay to post in
German, although the mailing list is international and anybody who
cared to look would see virtually only English. But the postings are
tolerated, and those of us who understand enough German tend to
respond, often in English, and often pointing out that the list is
international in nature and that many of the readers would prefer that
everyone posted in English.
(I would perhaps respond in German and summarize in English if I
could, but while I understand a bit of German, I have a hard time
constructing valid sentences on my own.)
What I find hard to tolerate is stuff in a foreign character set which
you can't even figure out how to decode. You can guess that someone
posting from .su might be using koi8-r, for example, but there are
several -- mutually incompatible -- Cyrillic character sets, and it's
rude to leave people guessing. It's even harder when you don't have
any clue about the origins of a message, such as if it was sent using
a Hotmail address and all you see is binary porridge, or if you don't
know anything about the domain (what character sets do they use in .tm?).
Moral: A two-line English summary never hurts if you think some people
might not otherwise see the point of your posting. And if you use
funny character sets, make sure your MIME headers are in shape.
In the end, I don't think you can find anything more than rules of
thumb and whatever politeness dictates. I don't find it hard to argue
on the basis of what would be polite, but that depends on how the
argument started out in the first place (if you're already flaming
violently, politeness has played out its part :-)
Hope this helps,
/* era */
-- Too much to say to fit into this .signature anyway: <http://www.iki.fi/era/> Fight spam in Europe: <http://www.euro.cauce.org/> * Sign the EU petition
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