MIME "Digests" (ultimate misnomer) still suck, even if somebody misidentified them with the words Outlook Express. They exist because the architecture allowed it, not to solve a practical problem. Regardless of terminology, we should make sure that Mailman users know how to avoid them.
On Wed, 28 Nov 2001 12:04:38 -0500 tneff tneff@bigfoot.com wrote:
MIME "Digests" (ultimate misnomer) still suck...
Actually I find them the most pleasant and useful form of digests and rather wish that 1153 digests were rapidly consigned to the grave of history.
They exist because the architecture allowed it, not to solve a practical problem.
MIME digests solve several problems, not least of which is providing a message packing format which is easily burst back into it original component messages.
---------(*) 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.
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. 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.
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. I am glad of the fact that 1153 will never go away.
--On Wednesday, November 28, 2001 10:42 AM -0800 J C Lawrence claw@kanga.nu wrote:
MIME digests solve several problems, not least of which is providing a message packing format which is easily burst back into it original component messages.
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.
---------(*) 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.
Don't blame the weaknesses of your selection of tools on the
^^^^
material.
-- J C Lawrence
I speak as a list manager, not as an individual member. As a member I am fully prepared to get & use any tool I need to deal with stuff, but as a list manager I cannot presume that my members will be in the same position. It's an application of one of the other time-honored Net principles which appears headed to the "grave of history" on the same hearse: be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you accept.
On Wed, 28 Nov 2001 14:14:43 -0500 tneff tneff@bigfoot.com wrote:
Don't blame the weaknesses of your selection of tools on the
^^^^material.
I speak as a list manager, not as an individual member. As a member I am fully prepared to get & use any tool I need to deal with stuff, but as a list manager I cannot presume that my members will be in the same position. It's an application of one of the other time-honored Net principles which appears headed to the "grave of history" on the same hearse: be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you accept.
Ahh, but there no press gang forcing use of MIME digests, or 1153 digests for that matter. Users (given list admin permission -- eg for some lists I disable digests entirely and for others I disable 1153 digests) are free to choose the mail formats they prefer and which their choice of mail tools presents most usably to them.
But none of that states that a particular technology or format is inherently bad because a particular choice of tool handles it badly.
---------(*) 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.
Ok, this is straying off topic.
I really have one problem with the Digests, MIME or otherwise, which is that someone almost always seems to reply to a message in a digest, and includes the entire digest in their reply, and often with a worthless subject.
I can catch some of those with message limit size, but not always. What's a list admin to do?
Bill Moseley mailto:moseley@hank.org
Quoting Bill Moseley (moseleymm@hank.org):
I really have one problem with the Digests, MIME or otherwise, which is that someone almost always seems to reply to a message in a digest, and includes the entire digest in their reply, and often with a worthless subject.
I can catch some of those with message limit size, but not always. What's a list admin to do?
I get a bunch of those too, mostly on the lists I run for pilots. Pilots are pretty clueless when it comes to computers - they got into the net because they heard there's lots of weather info here, but don't really have a clue about email stuff. You get an email with the subject line "[UpstateAv] Re: UpstateAv digest, Vol 1 #397 - 7 msgs" or whatever, and the whole bloody digest quoted under the new text, and the new text doesn't exactly make it clear which message the person is responding to. It's all part of the "TOFU" phenomenon, which I think is at least partly Outlook's fault. (TOFU == Text Over, Fullquote Under. It looks better in German.)
Personally, I don't even understand why people subscribe to a digest, so I can't offer any insight into how to cure the problem. If they do so in order to make sure they get all their list mail at one time rather than having it trickle in, then we could just hold their mail until a designated time and send it as several separate mails instead of one digest. But if it's so that they can have only one email instead of multiple, well I don't understand that at all, because I use a threading mail reader (mutt) and I want my mail in separate messages so they can be threaded the way *I* configured. So if that's their motivation, I can't offer any insight or help.
Some things we manage via technology, others with a big stick... This is a "big stick" item.
Jon
On Thursday 29 November 2001 08:28, Bill Moseley wrote:
Ok, this is straying off topic.
I really have one problem with the Digests, MIME or otherwise, which is that someone almost always seems to reply to a message in a digest, and includes the entire digest in their reply, and often with a worthless subject.
I can catch some of those with message limit size, but not always. What's a list admin to do?
Bill Moseley mailto:moseley@hank.org
"tneff" == tneff@bigfoot.com writes:
tneff> MIME "Digests" (ultimate misnomer) still suck, even if
tneff> somebody misidentified them with the words Outlook Express.
tneff> They exist because the architecture allowed it, not to
tneff> solve a practical problem. Regardless of terminology, we
tneff> should make sure that Mailman users know how to avoid them.
I humbly disagree. It all depends on your mail reader.
-Barry
participants (6)
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barry＠zope.com -
Bill Moseley -
J C Lawrence -
Jon Carnes -
Paul Tomblin -
tneff＠bigfoot.com