[EM] Election-methods Digest no longer reliable

[Abd ulRahman Lomax]

At 06:49 PM 6/17/2005, RLSuter at aol.com wrote:
>I have been subscribing to the digest in order to reduce
>the quantity of emails.

Obviously, it's up to each reader, but I've tried digests and they are more 
trouble than they are worth. Sure, you get fewer mails. But then you can't 
see the subject lines of each mail. To know what's in the digest, you have 
to scan the whole thing. The digest is not much less data than the sum of 
the individual mails, so download time shouldn't be much of an issue. And 
you don't get automatic threading (i.e, correct subject line) if you 
respond to a digest. Instead the subject line becomes the name of the digest.

But something that many readers never do which might solve the problem that 
leads many to use digests. I set a filter so that all mail from the list 
goes into a folder dedicated to that list. I can then see all the mails at 
once, I don't have to even look over the text of mails that don't interest 
me. I get mail from dozens of mailing lists, I'd go crazy if I had to sort 
it all myself. I don't do this, but if I didn't want to keep the mail, I 
can delete it all at once,just about as quickly as if it were in a digest.

Again, I don't do this, but if I really don't want to see what an 
individual writes, I can also set a filter to trash mail from that 
individual to the list (or directly to me, for that matter). I couldn't do 
that with a digest without trashing the whole digest.

Learning to use filters, if one doesn't know, is well worth the small effort.

I really can't see a good reason to use digests....

Lots of things can cause mail to get lost.... While it is possible that 
something happened with the list server, much more likely something 
happened between the server and Mr. Suter's mailbox. But if other list 
readers also didn't get those digests....