On Wed, Jan 08, 2014 22:03:26 PM +0000, e-letter wrote:
> For novices to mailing lists, a suggestion: subscribe using the
> digest mode. You receive a delayed, single combined message of a
> group of messages. It is an easy and convenient way to avoid the
> nonsense polluting your e-mail inbox.
with all respect, this is BAD advice. It's an easy way to accomplish
nothing AND get ignored or start more flamewars.
First, digest mode avoids NO pollution at all. If there are 100
useless or "nonsense" messages you still get ALL of them, just in one
batch, and mixed with all the others so they are HARDER to filter out.
Second, novices often answer to digests, when they don't start whole
new threads, by simply hitting "Reply" to the digest themselves. So:
- almost nobody bothers to open those answers because they have a
meaningless subject ("Re: digest of users@openoffice...")
- every subscriber gets all the messages of the previous day AGAIN
(which makes people with non-flat rate mobile connections
veeeeeeeeery happy)
- even people with flat rate connection start the usual flame war
between top and bottom posters because they get 5 lines of new text
before or after 1000 lines of digest
Marco
PS: not for "novices to mailing list", but people who wants to "avoid
the nonsense polluting the inbox" can completely filter out
uninteresting threads with this procmail trick:
http://freesoftware.zona-m.net/how-ignore-uninteresting-threads-in-mailing-lists/
I use it since when I wrote about it, and it works. I only
realized that there must have been pretty good flamewars here
recently when I got Rob's reminder about list policies yesterday
--
M. Fioretti http://mfioretti.com http://stop.zona-m.net
Your own civil rights and the quality of your life heavily depend on how
software is used *around* you
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