On 10 Aug 2005 at 17:24, Darcy James Argue wrote: > While I'm all for more selective quoting, in this age when virtually > all email clients have mail rules or smart mailboxes or mailing list > managers or thread managers, I have no idea why you or anyone else > subscribes to the digest. What possible advantage does the digest > have over creating a "Finale list" folder and a rule that > automatically sends all Finale list email there?
Time management is a good reason. If you're getting 3 or 4 messages a day from the mailing list, it's far fewer interruptions. Likewise, if all your mailing lists are coming in on digest, it means that the chances of your email client notifying you of a new message being something important are higher. Consider: In the last couple of weeks, this list has generated around 75-100 messages a day. if you have new mail notification turned on in your email client (and there are good reasons to do so), that would been 75-100 notices for non-urgent messages. On Digest, that would be only 3 or 4 a day. I don't know if the Digest is threaded by message topic, but that can be helpful, too, since you get the discussion all at once instead of in dribs and drabs. This can improve the quality of one's response. > I can think of lots of serious disadvantages to the digest -- you get > all the list messages much later, meaning when you're asking for help > you don't see the responses right away; it's harder to reply to > individual messages; you can't sort the list by thread; it's harder > to skip or delete messages you're not interested in, etc. Er, the mailing list software sets the reply to address on list posts to include both the list and the original poster's address. This means that if you post the list, most people reply both to the list and to the original poster. That means that someone on Digest is going to get replies from those people immediately, unless those replying purposely clear the individual's address (as I do when I reply to the list). > But I can't think of a single advantage -- except that it might take > you thirty seconds to set up a folder and a sorting rule. Is it really up to *you* to choose? I don't subscribe to the digest for this list (though I do for other lists), but I certainly would like to see the quotations trimmed. For one, there seems to be a habit of some people of combining top posting and interleaved replies (without explicitly flagging the post at the top to indicate that there are interleaved replies). If my email client didn't color code the quoted and non-quoted text, I'd often miss those. Particularly annoying to me is this kind of post: This is the beginning of the top post. > 1. This is quoted material. This is an interleaved reply to quoted material. > 2. This is additional quoted material. ==== <- this is the end of the post. This is a case where I wish the poster would delete quoted material #2, since it's not being replied to. And I *hate* when people leave signatures in because it can confuse me about who made the post, if I don't look carefully. So, basically, what I'm saying is that when you don't cut your quotations, it makes your post harder to read, because it requires more work on the part of the reader to figure out which parts are relevant. My rule is: don't include anything irrelevant and then the reader won't have to doing any extra work to figure out what's relevant. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
