[Tutor] Any good way to read Tutor mails?

[Michael Janssen]

On Sat, 19 Apr 2003 pan@uchicago.edu wrote:

> I'm using a 'webmail' client called 'Horde' or something ...

[it's IMP (Internet Mailing Programm) from horde.org]

> IMHO, the current technology should be able to give us something
> that you just see the title of all messages in "one window" (means
> dont' need to scroll). If u are interested in any mnsg, just
> click and read it, and if wanna reply, just click a button.

Interesting point. In order to bend it to current technologies: "one
window" must be the index-page of your email-client. But to display the
message-parts of the digest on this level, every digested message needs to
starts with an unixfrom-line (for mbox-format), as unixfrom indicates
start of message. That would be easy to implement into digest-code
(resulting in a huge message send that appears to be a lot of messages in
the index-list), but unfortunately (or luckily from a not so specific
point :-) MTA's are suppose to "escape" faked unixfrom lines in the middle
of a messages.

That leaves the solution to local side (your side): You might parse your
digest message and split it into several messages (with proper Subject and
From=20headers). Given, that the digests have a clear format, this is not
that hard to do, but requires shell-access to your ISP and tools like
procmail on the server (Python not to mention ;-).

Doing something like a different representation-type for digest mail
within IMP sounds like a tricky and not so good idea to me. Sending the
digest as attachment and establish a digest-file-format mailreader knows
to handle could be more reliable but also long ranged (Sending as mbox
attached and saving into mail-dir would be a workaround for the mbox-able
world).

> =A4=DE=A5=CE Anna Ravenscroft <revanna@mn.rr.com>:
>
> > Are you getting a digest version of the list?
>
> I have too many emails a day so I prefer the digest mode.

ISP-side limit or convenience? For the later, why not filter tutor mails
into another imap-folder? IMP has dump filtercapabilities but sufficient
for this task (given, that your ISP has enabled this feature). I have got
filter and folders for any of my mailinglists and would have gotten mad if
not ;-) I delete regularly all posts with "new" flag (which indicates the
subject hasn't interest me) and old posts from time to time.

Michael