Re: [Evolution] Proposal: to eliminate the digest option for the Evolution mailing list

[Pete Biggs <pete biggs org uk>]

> Why should we eliminate digests?
>
>    1. I know of no-one who still uses dial-up UUCP for their mail feed.
>       Even a basic "always-on" Internet service is orders of magnitude
>       faster than a Hayes modem so the savings in protocol overhead are
>       insignificant and the savings in cost non-existent.
>    2. Users of digests frequently don't fully understand how they work, or
>       how to use their MUA to deal with them. A typical error is to reply
>       to a digest rather than replying to the specific message *within*
>       the digest (something supported by many MUAs, including Evolution,
>       as long as the digest is MIME-formatted, which ours is by default).
>       The upshot is that the user either a) re-sends the entire digest as
>       quoted material in his reply (in pathological cases this could
>       happen multiple times with exponentially growing messages), or b)
>       attempts to be a good citizen by editing the reply to exclude the
>       extraneous material and changing the Subject back to what it should
>       be, without realising that this breaks message threading and annoys
>       everyone else.
>    3. Extra cruft in list handling software and mail clients (MUAs). For
>       backwards-compatibility reasons we're probably stuck with these
>       costs, but I mention them for completeness.

4. We're users of Evolution (that's why we are here) - Evolution has
tools for filtering list posts easily into a different folder. I can't
see that there is much difference between a folder full of emails and
an email full of emails. 

P.