Effective Participation
Online Groups provide a simple way of using email for group collaboration online. The value of the collaboration that can take place in an Online Group can be powerfully increased if the members follow some simple participation practices.
Once you are familiar with the basics of participating in email groups via email, take a short time to learn and follow the three Effective Participation Practices below.
Filtering
Set up your email programme to automatically put all the posts to your Online Group in a dedicated folder. The benefits and basics of this are explained in Filtering Group Emails into a Folder and the specifics of how to set up filtering is explained at How to Filter with Various email Programmes.
Threading
Using a subject line that clearly signals what your post is about and keeping the subject line intact when you reply to a post on the same subject makes your Online Group a rich, shared, searchable and self-organising knowledge-base (see Sorting and Searching the Group's Posts, Threading and How to Thread with Various Programmes).