Mike McClain wrote: > Bob Proulx wrote: > > People using digests usually don't know how to reply using them and > > cause a lot of problems. Please don't be the source of problems. > > Using a digested mailing list is hard! You need special tools in > > order to burst the digest to read and reply to it. > > I've been following this list for years and up until recently when > the digest broke subscribed to the digest. It's much quicker on dialup > to grab a ~32Kb block of mail than 10-15 individual messages. I hate to open a long diversion but what are you using as your mail transfer agent on your dialup? I used to use Taylor UUCP (the "ultimate" uucp program) and it was always quite efficient. But different environments are different. > I read the digest using mutt's 'v' to split it and 'L' to reply to > the list and never noticed when I replied that anything was amiss. Yes. That is fine. Mutt does almost everything well! > Does that not work the way I thought or are these the special tools > you're refering to and I just lucked into using them or have there been > problems with my posts that I'm unaware of? The problem is how many people who want to use digest mode are going to be using mutt? What about the ones who don't? The problems mostly come from those that don't. But how much flamage would I have attracted if I had said that people using digests but not using mutt are the source of a lot of problems? :-) The special tools I mentioned are tools like mutt. But others are available too. For example I used to read digests using Emacs VM mode where there is a command to burst the digest so that messages can be read and replies made using emacs-vm. That worked well too. I think Emacs gnus handles this too for that matter. Mutt isn't the only tool. As far as I am concerned any tool that operates correctly on the email is fine with me. For what it is worth the original poster sent the query using Mozilla Icedove which as far as I know does not know how to open digests and reply to individual messages. Digests are not common these days (they never were, really) and so people don't have a culture of using them and then don't realize that they need to do anything special with them. The weak link in the chain has always been people. They will commonly simply reply to the digest leaving the subject and in-reply-to headers unchanged and not trimming the body. In your mutt do 'l ~s "debian-user-digest Digest"' and you can see the latest crop of bad responses. Only a few recently but May was a particularly bad month. If I were to scan the archives I would be able to produce a number of particular egregious examples of reply fail when using digests. More if I searched other mailing lists. Bob
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