andrew cromack wrote:
=> 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
Then this should be called a summary, or compendium, not a
digest. The point as *I* understand it (meaning my opinion) is that
the purpose of a digest is not so much to reduce the amount of email
(in bytes) but the number of mailings. It is better to receive one
large mailing rather than 50+ individual mailings, cluttering up your
mailbox.
=> anything, provided the other correspondents use subjects sensibly.
this is a very LARGE caveat, as this rarely happens in a thread.
=> 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 ?
Not to my knowledge. it wouldn't be hard to to create a
summary from the digest code, since the summary is already there.
=> Is this what users want ?
one assumes this question is answerable?
Again in my experience, digested mail is preferable to
burst/single messages, in that other mail doesn't get lost in the
flurry of several mailing list's messages coming in sproadically.
fj..
===========================================================================
Franklin R. Jones Unix OS & Network Specialist
Paranet, Inc.
consultant to: USWest Service Assurance 7900 E. Union Ave,Suite 1100
frjones@sa.mnet.uswest.com Denver, Colorado 80237
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