The rule appears in Section 2.1.1 of RFC 1855, about two-thirds of the way down a list of guidelines for electronic mail:

If you include a signature keep it short. Rule of thumb is no longer than 4 lines. Remember that many people pay for connectivity by the minute, and the longer your message is, the more they pay.

Two sentences of instruction. One sentence of justification. The document moves on.

RFC 1855 is FYI 28 — “FYI” designates informational RFCs in the IETF’s taxonomy, guidance documents rather than specifications — published in October 1995 under the authorship of Sally Hambridge of Intel Corp. and identified as the product of the Responsible Use of the Network (RUN) Working Group. Its structure is a series of bulleted guidelines covering three categories of internet communication: one-to-one (mail and talk), one-to-many (mailing lists and NetNews), and information services (Gopher, WWW, FTP). The tone throughout is flat and practical. Don’t send chain letters. Use mixed case. Keep signatures short.

The document exists because of a specific historical moment. The RFC’s introduction notes that early internet users “grew up” with the network and understood it technically, but that the community was changing to include people who didn’t. In 1995 the internet was arriving in a lot of places it had not been before — corporate intranets, AOL, the early public web — and the norms that had developed inside technical communities were not traveling with it at the same speed the people were. A document like RFC 1855 was how institutions tried to carry the norms forward. It gathered what practitioners already knew, wrote it down, and stamped an RFC number on it.

The document does not say where the four-line rule came from. It came from Usenet.

The newsgroup

alt.fan.warlord was a Usenet newsgroup whose purpose, from the beginning, was to mock signature files.

The name was a joke. The original target — the one who gave the group its name — was a user posting around 1991 under the handle “Death Star, War Lord of the West,” notorious for a signature block that included an outsized ASCII graphic generally described as resembling the sword from the 1981 film Conan the Barbarian, along with quotations and ASCII art that could run for dozens of lines. The community that formed to ridicule him took the name in sarcastic tribute, and what they practiced became known as “warlording.” The Jargon File defines it as “the act of excoriating a bloated, ugly, or derivative sig block” and describes the characteristic mode as “devastatingly sarcastic praise.”

Common targets had their own acronyms. BUAGs were Big Ugly ASCII Graphics: the swords, the cartoon characters, the elaborate ASCII renderings of spaceships. BUAFs were Big Ugly ASCII Fonts — words spelled out in blocky hash-character letterforms. The community’s objection was aesthetic, social, and technical in roughly equal measure. The ASCII art was ugly. Posting it announced you as someone who didn’t yet understand what was done here. And practically, long signatures consumed bandwidth and filled screens that belonged to the actual message.

The four-line limit that eventually took the name “McQuary limit” was named after George F. McQuary. The Jargon File carries an entry for “McQuary limit” defining the rule as four lines, 80 columns maximum, and an entry for “warlording” that documents the practice. The Jargon File attributes the term to “the founder of alt.fan.warlord”; Wiktionary describes McQuary as “a frequent contributor to the newsgroup alt.fan.warlord” rather than its originator — a question the available record does not settle. What both accounts agree on is that the limit reflects a community norm rather than one person’s edict.

Sven Guckes, a German computer scientist who maintained the alt.fan.warlord FAQ, had a standalone page titled “Signatures Improved — Four Lines Suffice!” hosted at his university web presence, created in 1998 and updated through 2003. The page refers throughout to “McQ (4x80)” without explaining who McQuary was or where the norm came from. By 1998 the origin was apparently assumed to be known. Guckes died in 2022.

Twenty-eight references

RFC 1855 has a “Selected Bibliography” section. It lists twenty-eight items.

The list is a reasonable cross-section of internet conduct literature in 1995: books, standing FAQs, a few other RFCs. The books include Angell and Heslop’s The Elements of E-mail Style (Addison-Wesley, 1994), Ed Krol’s The Whole Internet (O’Reilly, 1992), Virginia Shea’s Netiquette (Albion Books, 1994). The FAQs include Brad Templeton’s “Emily Postnews Answers Your Questions on Netiquette,” Chuq Von Rospach’s “A Primer on How to Work With the Usenet Community,” and Gene Spafford’s “Rules for posting to Usenet.” There is RFC 1087, the Internet Activities Board’s statement on ethics from 1989. There is an earlier paper by Hambridge herself, co-authored with J. Sedayao, on the evolution of corporate internet guidelines, from a 1993 Usenix conference.

None of the twenty-eight is alt.fan.warlord. None mentions McQuary.

The Von Rospach and Spafford documents are the bibliography’s closest approach to Usenet community norms, and they are both generic conduct guides — be brief, don’t cross-post unnecessarily — rather than records of any specific community’s standards. No newsgroup appears as a citation, specific or general.

Before the bibliography, the document includes this sentence: “Items not specifically found in these works were gathered from the IETF-RUN Working Group’s experience.”

That clause is where the four-line rule lives. The Working Group had it from somewhere — from the practical knowledge of people who had used the internet in the early 1990s, who had encountered the norm or the community that enforced it, or who had encountered the norm traveling at secondhand through the kind of informal culture-transfer that happened in pre-web Usenet circles. The RFC doesn’t say where it came from. The attribution stops at “experience.”

A different register

There is something specific about the reason RFC 1855 gives for the four-line rule, and it is not the reason alt.fan.warlord cared about four lines.

The RFC’s justification: “Remember that many people pay for connectivity by the minute, and the longer your message is, the more they pay.”

This was accurate in 1995. Dial-up internet charges were metered in many configurations. Bandwidth was genuinely scarce. Sending someone a long message cost them real money in a concrete sense. The economic argument was not fabricated.

But the alt.fan.warlord community’s enforcement of the norm was not primarily economic. The objection was to the ugly ASCII sword. It was to the newcomer who thought an elaborate signature made a statement. It was to BUAGs and BUAFs specifically, in their specific badness. The community’s reasoning was aesthetic and social, and the enforcement mechanism — public ridicule in a newsgroup dedicated to it — had a quality not translatable into a bullet point in a professional standards document.

The rule traveled. The justification didn’t.

The register is different. What the RFC version cannot do is explain why violations were funny, or why the newsgroup was called “alt.fan.warlord” rather than something descriptive, or why Guckes found it worth publishing a four-lines FAQ for five years. The economic argument explains why four lines is sensible. It explains nothing about the texture.

This is not a criticism of RFC 1855. FYI documents are not the place for community ethnography, and the Working Group’s job was to produce practical guidance, not an archaeology of the norms it was formalizing. But the translation is worth noting, because it is characteristic of how community norms become institutional standards. The community does the work of establishing, testing, and enforcing a norm over years. The institution inherits the conclusion.

The four-line rule appears in Section 2.1.1 — the section on mail. The Usenet section, 3.1.3, recommends that users include signatures for contact-information purposes but does not specify a length. The norm that emerged from a Usenet community ended up in the email section of the document that codified it, not the Usenet section.

alt.fan.warlord itself faded with the general decline of Usenet. By the mid-2000s it was mostly quiet. Google Groups still archives it; the most recent posts visible are spam from the 2010s and a few off-topic threads, the usual texture of a dead community with its door still technically open. The community that enforced the norm had dispersed long before the norm finished traveling.

The four-line rule has outlasted its original justification. Metered dial-up connectivity charges are not the operative concern they were in 1995. The rule still appears in email client signature settings, in company IT policies, in informal advice passed from experienced users to new ones. Some of that lineage runs through RFC 1855. Some runs more directly through alt.fan.warlord’s influence on early internet norms, through Guckes’s FAQ and the Jargon File and the general culture of a community that spent years making fun of people who got this wrong.

The sarcasm didn’t make it into the standard. The limit did.