[Mailman-Users] [OT] Digests in general (was: MIME Digests)

[Paul Tomblin]

Quoting Bill Moseley (moseleymm at hank.org):
> I really have one problem with the Digests, MIME or otherwise, which is
> that someone almost always seems to reply to a message in a digest, and
> includes the entire digest in their reply, and often with a worthless subject.
> 
> I can catch some of those with message limit size, but not always.  What's
> a list admin to do?

I get a bunch of those too, mostly on the lists I run for pilots.  Pilots
are pretty clueless when it comes to computers - they got into the net
because they heard there's lots of weather info here, but don't really
have a clue about email stuff.  You get an email with the subject line
"[UpstateAv] Re: UpstateAv digest, Vol 1 #397 - 7 msgs" or whatever, and
the whole bloody digest quoted under the new text, and the new text
doesn't exactly make it clear which message the person is responding to.
It's all part of the "TOFU" phenomenon, which I think is at least partly
Outlook's fault.  (TOFU == Text Over, Fullquote Under.  It looks better in
German.)

Personally, I don't even understand why people subscribe to a digest, so I
can't offer any insight into how to cure the problem.  If they do so
in order to make sure they get all their list mail at one time rather than
having it trickle in, then we could just hold their mail until a
designated time and send it as several separate mails instead of one
digest.  But if it's so that they can have only one email instead of
multiple, well I don't understand that at all, because I use a threading
mail reader (mutt) and I want my mail in separate messages so they can be
threaded the way *I* configured.  So if that's their motivation, I can't
offer any insight or help.


-- 
Paul Tomblin <ptomblin at xcski.com>, not speaking for anybody
Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code.