On Wed, 28 Nov 2001 13:43:13 -0500 tneff <tneff@bigfoot.com> wrote:
The problem is that they don't really Digest or pack anything, or save any space, or do anything except collate a bunch of stuff into a multipart sandwich.
Precisely. That's exactly what they're intended to do, and is what is so useful about them.
There's precious little of use to be done with them that you couldn't do just as easily by getting individual messages and putting them into a folder, which more mail agents can successfully do than will handle all the exploding and stuff.
<shrug> UI/feature problems with MUAs is not a big concern for me.
FWLIW Some MUAs support indicating a specific message that you wish to reply to in a MIME digest and then generating a reply buffer from there exactly as if the message had been burst.
On a more human scale I've several (a little over a dozen that I know of) members who specifically want/require their messages bundled in time. I moderate one of my lists (which is hand moderated) once a day. Traffic runs somewhere between 20 and 50 posts a day on average. Several members have stated that if I didn't moderate so infrequently they would resort to digest mode instead and would then never post.
As the original poster said, they are useless for the thing Digests were really good for, which was saving a lot of overhead and scanning a day's traffic in a single read.
Umm, actually that's exactly what I use them for. This is rather helped by the fact that exmh (my choice of MUA) presents a usable and reasonably well featured UI for MIME digests making using them easy and pleasant.
Don't blame the weaknesses of your selection of tools on the material.
--
J C Lawrence
---------(*) Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
claw@kanga.nu He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/ Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.