At 21:07 2003-02-16 +0100, M. Fioretti wrote:
> That's what digest mode is intended to relieve.
>
I must be particularly thick on this, but I have never been able to
see the point of digest mode, and of the assertion above.
As far as I understand, digests are not compressed, or are they?
Digests are one message, sans the headers of each of the individual
contributions. You get one large message instead of (potentially) a score
or two of smaller ones.
If a list generates one message per day, I'll have to read one
message per day. If it generates 100, I'll have to read 100,
regardless if they show as "one message" or "100 messages" in the
mailbox.
I don't think of list traffic as being something I _must_ read.
I prefer to receive individual messages, because that is how I reply to
messages (people using digests often reply using the digeat subject or
posting back large portions of the digeated message which have nothing to
do with the part of the message they're replying to - at least, this has
proven true on other lists where digests are used more frequently). I can
label individual contributions in my mail client as being deserving of
future attention ("useful reference information" "need to reply", etc).
I do subscribe in digest mode to a few tech lists, on which I occasionally
monitor content, but do not really contribute. Lists where I want to be
able to search for references periodically, but don'r have a need for the
messages to be individual entities.
So, what is the gain? I'm just sincerely curious,
Some guy who feels overwhelmed by 200 1K messages in his inbox may feel
less so with 10 20K messages there.
fun of anybody. Are there ISPs that shut down accounts receiving more
than X messages per day (if limited, it would make more sense to to
I know that there are some which limit the number of _sent_
messages. Received messages tend to be limited on total _mailbox_ size,
and 10 20K messages will have a *LOT* less header junk (have you looked at
the procmail list headers lately?) since they'll have *ONE* set of them for
all the messages in that digest.
From an administrative standpoint, a couple of bounced digests are a *LOT*
less annoying than 40+ individual bounced messages because some tosser
doesn't check his mail frequently enough.
With 100 different messages, skipping without reading the 95
uninteresting ones is much faster than in digest mode, isn't it?
Yes. Then again, formail has a "digest bursting" mode intended to
reconstruct a pile of individual messages from a single digest (I haven't
used that in eons though). So someone wanting to reduce the amount of
cruft coming in through their network connection could subscribe in digest
and burst them at their end and sort of have both worlds.
messages with ***totally*** uninformative subjects and content 95%
irrelevant)
I have a digest rule in my majordomo helper filters, which rejects messages
with digest subjects, and also rejects messages which are highly quoted or
contain other digest signatures which should have been trimmed out. It has
done wonders for reducing the crap load on those lists, and attempts to
automate the process of educating those posters as to why is isn't
appropriate to send 50K of cruft back to the list.
---
Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering
Procmail disclaimer: <http://www.professional.org/procmail/disclaimer.html>
Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies. I'll get my copy from the list.
_______________________________________________
procmail mailing list
procmail(_at_)lists(_dot_)RWTH-Aachen(_dot_)DE
http://MailMan.RWTH-Aachen.DE/mailman/listinfo/procmail