[Mailman-Users] Re: MIME Digests

[J C Lawrence]

On Wed, 28 Nov 2001 13:43:13 -0500 
tneff  <tneff at bigfoot.com> wrote:

> The problem is that they don't really Digest or pack anything, or
> save any space, or do anything except collate a bunch of stuff
> into a multipart sandwich.  

Precisely.  That's exactly what they're intended to do, and is what
is so useful about them.

> There's precious little of use to be done with them that you
> couldn't do just as easily by getting individual messages and
> putting them into a folder, which more mail agents can
> successfully do than will handle all the exploding and stuff.

<shrug>  UI/feature problems with MUAs is not a big concern for me.

FWLIW Some MUAs support indicating a specific message that you wish
to reply to in a MIME digest and then generating a reply buffer from
there exactly as if the message had been burst.

On a more human scale I've several (a little over a dozen that I
know of) members who specifically want/require their messages
bundled in time.  I moderate one of my lists (which is hand
moderated) once a day.  Traffic runs somewhere between 20 and 50
posts a day on average.  Several members have stated that if I
didn't moderate so infrequently they would resort to digest mode
instead and would then never post.

> As the original poster said, they are useless for the thing
> Digests were really good for, which was saving a lot of overhead
> and scanning a day's traffic in a single read.  

Umm, actually that's exactly what I use them for.  This is rather
helped by the fact that exmh (my choice of MUA) presents a usable
and reasonably well featured UI for MIME digests making using them
easy and pleasant.

Don't blame the weaknesses of your selection of tools on the
material.

-- 
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.