Meta-sideline: digesting

From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_yeats.ucc.ie>
Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2000 22:54:21 GMT


I irrevocably lose Theo Posselt's respect:
> < Digests are Silly >
>
> Normally I respect your opinion, but in this case you are so terribly
> wrong.

And to show you how unrepentant I am: the first thing my email program does with the Digester is to undigest it, and the second thing it does it to filter it into a separate mailbox. Me actually reading it may happen waaaay later. So about all digesting 'does' for me is to act as a 'discretiser' (all the mail arriving at once, which it has been decreed from on high (list admins past) is a Good Thing), and to make more work for me in 'maintaining' (i.e., coping strategy when my mailer breaks itself, or the Digest breaks it for it). Both of which I could easily live without, really.

As Jeff Kyer says, most decent list-servers will support both, running off the same submissions, which would be preferable from my POV, though it would still break up threads as submissions from digest-readers, especially ones who don't or can't 'undigest', as they won't have direct access to Subject lines in the article headers (and definitely not article references etc, which M-D doesn't preserve).

Apologies to you non-geeks for this interlude.

Cheers,
Alex.


Powered by hypermail