[Mailman-Users] The "right" way to reply to a mailing list

[Peter Shute]

Thomas Gramstad wrote:

> > Subscribing in digest mode allows me to receive one cumulative post 
> > per day (about, unless there is more traffic) and deal with 
> them not 
> > interrupting my other activities.
> >
> > A proper MUA shall allow to read each message in the digest 
> as if it 
> > were a single e-mail (and reply, archive, forward etc. etc.).
> 
> But people don't have proper MUAs, or if they do, many don't 
> know how to use them. So if you allow the digest version, 
> somebody will respond to one of the messages in the digest 
> version with a oneliner response which is top posted, 
> followed by the quotation of the whole digest, and with a 
> pointless Subject: (digest
> number) thrown in for good measure.

All this talk about digests and being able to extract the original emails prompted me to try setting one of my subscriptions to digest mode. 

I had previously tried this and found that the resulting emails were presented to me in Outlook as one long email, and that replying to one of the contained emails involved editing out all the other emails, and adjusting the subject line. The reply behaviour of our list's digest members suggests they have to do the same thing (but often forget).

But this time I tried unticking the "Plain" option for my subscription. I was surprised to see that they did start coming through as individual attachements, and that I could open them and reply to them "properly". This works in both Outlook and iOS Mail.

But all I see is an index and a long list of unnamed attachments. If I want to read them, I have to open them one by one to see what's in them, or look at the index numbers and count through the attachements to find the right one. Is this normal? Perhaps this is something to do with convert_html_to_plaintext being set to On? We also have mime_is_default_digest set to Plain.

Peter Shute