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

[Patrick O'Callaghan <poc usb ve>]

On Mon, 2017-03-13 at 18:00 +0000, Pete Biggs wrote:
> > 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. 

Well put.

poc