Michael C. Berch wrote:
> And mail reading programs were much less sophisticated in
> terms of sorting messages. People who want to read messages from a
> mailing list all together can easily sort them into a folder, or use a
> selection function to pick them out of the inbox. I think the heyday
> of digests is probably behind us.
Mail reading programs are not all sophisticated yet today, or perhaps it
is that there are too many users who are not sophisticated in their use
of mail clients. And there are systems that have limits on the number of
messages. At one point I was led to understand that AOL paid more
attention to the NUMBER of messages than the byte count, is that correct?
A daily digest of my 50-100 messages in a busy day has definite advantages
over receiving those messages throughout the day, as well as distinct
disadvantages.
Yes, the high water mark for the digest is past us, some might even
argue that the day of the mailing list is past, too, but that doesn't
mean either is archaic quite yet. However, to return to the original thrust
of this thread, I don't think an out-of-date digest standard, however badly
followed, should prevent us from looking to the future in terms of
the types of message formatting we allow on our lists, at least those of
us who choose to do so, now or at some time in the future.
--
Mike Nolan
