On Tue, 10 Apr 2001, Amy Stinson wrote:
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 20:23:50 -0500
From: Amy Stinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Digests
Personally, I'm not a big fan of digests. That being said, roughly a
third of my members use digest on my largest, most active list.
...
With all of this discussion of digests it looks like this message by Amy
got lost in the winds, which is unfortunate because I think it's right
on target.
Digests, like all things list management related, have their good points
and their bad points. Personally, I'm not especially a fan of them but
then I'm particularly email literate and I use an email client I can
actually get to do what I want. So, all the "usual" reasons digests
exist are just a non-issue for me.
However, digests are popular for "unusual" reasons, too. I just did a
quick check of my lists and discovered that as many as 3% of subscribers
are on both the discussion list and the digest list when a list supports
both. I'm not even going to try and explain that one.
One thing that does bother me in this whole discussion is it seems that
people are blaming the failure of list management, email client, and
archive technologies to properly implement multipart/digest as a failure
of multipart/digest.
While I agree that in terms of the big picture the description of
multipart/digest is woefully inadequate, blaming the fact that email
clients or archive technologies can not keep threading or message
references organized is not the fault of the digest itself. If anything
is it at fault it is the list technology for not creating a digest those
technologies can use, for example, when a list technology does not
follow the spirit of the standard and does not put the entire message in
the digest. With the entire message all the other technologies have at
least half a chance to do the right thing.
As I've said before, it is obvious, to me at least, that if I'm going to
create a digest then it should be created using multipart/digest. It
doesn't matter what I think about digests. As a service provider my
customers get what they want. Admittedly, the two technical questions
that are less obvious to me are:
1. What to set the outermost message From: header to?
2. How to include the table of contents for the digest?
And we've had some good discussion about these....
Jim
