How Do I Send Messages To The Group?
What Best Practices Do You Recommend When Posting Messages?

To send a message to the group and start a new topic, send a new email to emco-cnc-users@groups.io or login to groups.io, select emco-cnc-users from the pull down menu at the top of the page, and click on "New Topic" in the left side menu.

When using email to send a message to the group it must come from an email address you have registered with groups.io, either as your main address or as an email alias. Messages from unknown email addresses aren't allowed to avoid spam.

If you want to reply to a post, things get a bit more complicated.

emco-cnc-users is configured to reply to the entire group and to the sender by default, but it seems that every piece of email software handles things differently, so how the reply options are configured doesn’t actually assure what happens. When you hit “Reply” or “Reply-All” in your email tool, examine the TO line to be certain the message is going to the place you want it to go. In general, your reply will at least go to the entire group, so be careful. Edit the TO line in your email to remove the group if you want your reply to go back only to the sender.

Also note that at the bottom of any message sent to the group there are several links.  In most cases, among those links are “Reply to Sender” and “Reply to Group”.  (There is an exception: if the sender of the message sent it in plain text format, those two links will not be present. The reasons are technical and don't need to be included here.) These will do exactly what they suggest, but don’t include the message contents in the reply.

Some best practices:

With a new topic, start a new email thread.  Don't just grab a random message, hit “reply”, and add unrelated contents to the message to start a new thread. That is hard for others to follow.

If you get the message digest rather than individual emails, there are buttons in the digest messages to let you reply about a particular message. Use those! They help everyone know what you're referring to with your reply.

If a thread gets long, please delete much or all of it – particularly pictures – when you reply. 

When replying, look *very* carefully at who you are replying too. Any email based system like this makes it possible to accidentally reply to the entire list when you meant to reply to just one person.  Check those TO and CC lines every time you reply to be sure your message is going where you want it to.

On message content:

In short: be nice, concise, and avoid giving offense.

When writing about some topics, be sure to provide all the relevant details. In short, try to tell people everything they need to know, rather than make them ask you for more details.