What is Quotation Of The Day?

The Quotation Of The Day mailing list (qotd), founded in 1990, exists for the distribution of amusing, inspirational, bizarre, or simply interesting quotations. Anyone with an e-mail account is welcome to join and contribute quotations. The list itself is moderated as little as possible, with an eye towards preventing duplicate quotations, uninteresting quotations, and quotations with errors from appearing.

Additions, deletions, help, comments:

To be added or deleted from the mailing list, your request should be e-mailed to quotationoftheday_request at yahoo.ca (which is not a listserver, but I accept most of the same commands :-). If you have any suggestions or comments about the Quotation Of The Day list, please send them to that address as well.

Cost:

Quotation Of The Day is completely free. However, if you wish to help the Quotation Of The Day editors defray the costs of running this list (namely Internet connectivity, a lot of reference books, and an occasional bottle of cheap wine), you are welcome to support Quotation Of The Day with a Paypal donation. You can also support Quotation Of The Day at no cost to yourself by purchasing through the Amazon links on our web site, as we earn a commission on such purchases.

Support Quotation Of The Day with a donation

The software that runs this mailing list will not respond to requests to obtain a list of subscribers. Your email address will remain confidential and will never be used for any commercial purpose.

If you post messages sent to you from the list to a public site, please mangle the list addresses to prevent email spammers from adding them to their evil archives. If you meet a spammer, kick them repeatedly in the knees.

Submissions:

Please submit quotations through e-mail to quotationoftheday at yahoo.ca. Your e-mail messages should be in text format, contain only one submission and have no signature or other information appended at the bottom. Preferably, submissions will include the source of the quotation to prevent apocrypha or misattributions from being sent. PLEASE remember that 80 column terminals are still in common use! Use lines shorter than 80 characters.

Submissions are handled automatically by a simple-minded, homemade manager. I do scan the submissions before they go out, but I'd prefer to have to do as little work on them as possible. That includes editing to remove obvious typos! If you wish to revise or correct a previously submitted quotation, send the correction to qotd-request.

There is a message queue and only one message a day will be sent. If you have made a submission and are concerned because it did not immediately go out on the list, don't panic. It is likely stacked in a holding pattern, awaiting transmission. The date a submission was received is placed at the bottom of the message, so you can judge how long messages wait before being sent.

Experience has shown that readers of the list enjoy variety in their quotations. To ensure your personal popularity, please do not submit many quotations from a single person at once, since I try not to reorder the queue.

Users should keep in mind that readers of this list come from many different nations and different professions and the context of a quotation may not be readily apparent to all. Consider whether a short explanation might be necessary for your submissions.

I do not censor submissions on the basis of content. I will cancel submissions if they are repetitions of previous quotations, or if they do not count as quotations (for example, sending one's own writing). Apocrypha, anonymous folk sayings, and urban legends will not be sent on the list, although quotations "heard on the net" will be considered if they are original. In general, I will not notify the submitter if I've cancelled a submission for one of the above reasons. As well, "flame wars" will not be allowed to take place through the list.

Due to many requests from subscribers concerned with the poor quality of some submissions, I will edit submitted quotations and place a very low priority on sending those I consider to be of little interest to subscribers. I'd hoped to avoid this, but I'd rather edit the quotations than be processing a lot of unsubscription requests.

Quotations:

These should arrive in your mailbox daily. Should you not receive one, it's almost certainly due to the occasional email problems we all suffer from, or because no one has submitted a quotation recently. (The latter is increasingly unlikely.) Contact quotationoftheday_request at yahoo.ca if you continue to have problems.

Politics:

Nothing in the quotations submitted should be taken to indicate advocacy of any particular view by the submitter or mailing list. Quotations are submitted and distributed in the hope that they will be found interesting by subscribers. It is possible to find something interesting enough to send to the list and still disagree with the intent of the person quoted.

Archives:

Archives of quotations are unavailable. This may change.

World Wide Web:

Quotation of the Day is available on the Web at http://sites.google.com/site/quotationoftheday/.