Hi! I don't have a specific question but am eager to get some general
input from people who have experienced the same as I have when
administrating their lists. It's about multipart'ed Digests which
subscribers don't know how to handle.
I have recently started using one of the common mailing list software
packages for my mailing list. Earlier I did it by hand, except I had
a home-grown script to create and send out digests. (The list is
available in two forms: digested or not digested.)
My home-grown script ignored RFC 1153 and just put the messages
together, keeping the headers I thought people would be interested in,
and divided in a way I thought was visually clear. Now the digests
are "standard" digests not only following RFC 1153 but also MIMEd with
"Content-Type: multipart/digest" etc.
The most visible change for many of my subscribers is that now their
mail programs know that the digests consist of several messages and
thus behave in ways they don't expect. One complains that he gets
"empty digests" followed by the individual messages. Another that he
must press space and return to go to the next message and there's no
way to get back up in the digest except by starting from the top of it
again. I don't know what mail programs they use and what features
they have, but it seems probable to me that there are ways to do what
they want and that it's possible to turn off automatic undigesting of
digests.
Anyway it seems like everyone who has commented on the new digests on
the list wants the old just-one-big-message behaviour back. But I'm
reluctant, as I think it must be inherently good that the mail
programs get a chance to know where the individual messages start and
end and wish the subscribers would read the documentation for their
mail software to find out how to make it behave like they want to
instead.
(Most of my subscribers are not very computer literate.)
What are your experience with this? Is it really an advantage with
properly constructed digests, or do too many people out there only get
problems with them that they can't cope with?
-- "
Per Starback, Uppsala, Sweden. email: starback@minsk.docs.uu.se
"Life is but a gamble! Let flipism chart your ramble!"
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