On 8 Apr 2001, at 12:04, Tom Neff wrote:
> I've said this here before, but since the question's on the floor: "MIME
> Digests" stink. RFC1153 is the way to go. Plain text, space saving, a
> single daily read. ...
Well, I"ve said this here before and... Why are there still digests?
Digests are nothing but trouble and inconvenience. They were born in a
world of very primitive mail clients as, basically, a workaround, and
should have died decades ago... Maybe "modern" digests have fixed this
sort of thing but digests:
1) break threading
2) force you to read the forum at the digest-maker's chosen frequency,
rather than at your frequency. [twice a day? once a week?]
3) break all sorts of attachments and other per-message formatting info
[all of the present discussion is basically all various not-great
attempts to cope with a fundamental brokenness of digests].
4) make it tricky [if even possible] with most mail clients to archive
individual messages [with MIME digests, I think that most clients can
'reply' properly these days, so you don't get the mark-of-the-clueless
'Re: YOURLIST-DIGEST Vol X edition YYY' posts to the forum; with the
plain-text digests it is [at least for the clients I"ve played with] a
REAL hassle doing a reply/followup properly]. But I'm not sure that most
clients will let you 'refile' a single message out of a MIME digest into
a separate folder, will they?
5) You can't filter/sort/highlight **KILL**.. you're stuck just
shuffling through "day's batch".. if you're not interested in a thread,
you can't kill it, skip it or ignore it, since the replies on the thread
are scattered through the digest...etc, etc... [you've basically
crippled all of the nice tools your mail client has to help you deal with
your incoming mail efficiently and effectively.
The 'single daily read' is a real red herring of course: with even crude
[but modern] mail clients, you can sort the list traffic into a folder
and have it there for reading at YOUR convenience [and have all the
sections and MIMEs just-right, and have everything threaded properly,
even if the threads cross several days]. And if you want to check the
list twice today? That's fine. And if you want to not check it over the
weekend? That's fine: instead of having three digests waiting for you on
Monday you just have a tidy, sorted folder...
I could see, perhaps [but even there it is a stretch] if it were an
*edited* digest: with messages on a single thread grouped together, dross
edited out, signatures removed/trimmed, attachments somehow dealt with,
etc, etc. But the only digests I've seen have all been of the fat, dumb,
and happy kind: they just lump all of the day's messages into a random
assemblage, in whatever order was convenient for the MLM, and leave it to
the forum participants to make sense out of the jumble.
> ..Anyone who can
> profitably deal with a "MIME Digest" could just as well handle the
> single-message flow.
I don't know who this sort of person is [who *can* profitably deal with a
digest?] But: how do you reply to a posting in an 1153 digest? I don't
know of a mail client that auto-parses that format any more -- are there
some? [I confess not to have bothered much with digests in a decade or
two, so I'm not really up-to-date; I had something that 'burst' digests
years and years ago, but haven't worried about all that in a long time].
And since there are no invidual message-IDs, you can't have followups
thread properly [for those mail clients that will use the References info
for threading].
=========================
Counter-suggestion: why not, instead of perpetuating this whole concept
of 'digests', have the 'welcome' message for the forum include
instructions for the four or five most-popular mail clients on how to set
up a simple filter [based on whatever's appropriat for your MLM --
probably sorting on 'Sender' for most] into a folder and let digests just
die a worthy death...
/Bernie\
--
Bernie Cosell Fantasy Farm Fibers
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Pearisburg, VA
--> Too many people, too few sheep <--
