David G. Miller wrote:
>
> I have a number of old habits regarding how I use e-mail and getting the list in
> digest form fits better with these habits than your suggestions. I appreciate
> the suggestions but I'm really quite happy getting the list just once a day in
> digest form rather than have a steady stream of e-mails with intermittent
> flurries of activity that comes with getting the e-mails individually.
Most people just let their mail client filter lists to a folder that
they visit at convenient times. Now that there are free mail account
services like gmail and yahoo, you can use a slightly more drastic
approach and send them to a different account that your mail client can
handle separately - or you might like their web interfaces. With gmail
you don't have to make a choice - you can set it up so your mailer grabs
a copy with POP but it also archives a copy on the server. That way you
can read-and-delete locally but can use the web interface to search or
follow threads farther back than you saved if you decide some topic
becomes interesting later.
> There are also a number of benefits to letting some topics "settle out" before I
> get a chance to see them or respond that I won't go into at this point. One I
> will point out that you will still need to contend with is as follows. People
> (like me) who read the digest frequently are able to take a step back from some
> of the discussions and bring together multiple responses and several otherwise
> diverging threads. The threaded message view is based on the sometimes false
> assumption that once threads diverge they cannot later merge. Several times I
> have ended up consolidating replies to several divergent threads because that's
> where "the answer" was to be found. The threaded view of a discussion may be a
> nice way of organizing the elements of the discussion but it doesn't necessarily
> reflect the object of the discussion which is to find an answer.
I usually read new messages backwards (newest first) so as not to bother
with already-solved problems, but I still want the mailer to be able to
flip to a threaded view at the push of a button when the context doesn't
make sense or I want to go back farther.
> One of the other responders pointed me to Gmane as a way to reply to individual
> postings. I'm using Gmane to compose this and will attempt to continue using it
> in the future (I've been known to forget such things). Gmane appears to fit my
> criteria of not imposing any significant additional effort while letting me
> continue to enjoy the list in digest form.
I'd recommend giving gmail a try too, if you haven't used it already.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com