I'm a little confused about the purpose of a digest list. Perhaps someone
can shed a bit of light ?
It strikes me that a digest should be a periodic update to inform readers
of the traffic on a given list. Then, if a particular article looks
interesting, based on subject/author/whatever the user can retrieve the
relevant archive file to get the full text of the message. To achieve
this a digest should contain only a summary of each message, perhaps the
date, subject and sender fields. A user susbscribed to a digest list
thus has a reduced amount of e-mail to read, but does not miss out on
anything, provided the other correspondents use subjects sensibly.
However this is *not* the type of digest implemented by Majordomo or, as
far as I am aware, Listserv. With these systems, each digest contains all
the texts of all the messages during the period, *plus* a list of
subjects. The reader of digest list thus gets an even larger hit on their
mailbox than the reader of the un-digestified list though at longer
intervals.
Are there any systems which provide the sort of digest I have described,
or is the MD/listserv type all-pervading ? Is this what users want ?
Andrew
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