On 10/30/2010 11:09 AM, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
On Fri, 2010-10-29 at 19:26 -0400, Todd Zullinger wrote:
Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
PS The guidelines don't go far enough. Replying to a digest even if
you change the Subject line is still going to annoy a lot of people
because it breaks list threading. Digests are an obsolete artefact
that really only works for people who just read list traffic and
never reply.
I don't think this is true -- at least not for if you use the
mime-style digest.  It's trivial in most clients to reply to
individual messages from the mime-style digest and have proper
threading, subject, etc.
I wasn't aware of that. I think the last time I received a digest must
be over 10 years ago. Does "most clients" include Evolution, Thunderbird
and Kmail (which I'm guessing are probably the top three on these
lists)?

Just because I *hate* speculation I subscribed my wife's email to the digest of the fedora's user mailing list.  She uses T-Bird.

For each message in the digest there is a separate mime-part/attachment and the list is shown in a frame at the bottom of the email.  All of the mime-parts are display inline so you can scroll down and read them in one "easy" motion.

One issue is that there is no number for each attachment that matches the number in "Today's Topics" to make it easier to relate the numbers to the attachment.  But, you can easily count, going left to right.

Assuming you pick the correct attachment, you simply double click on it to read the individual email and you can reply to it and it alone and the resulting subject is "correct" in that it isn't the digest subject.

The only thing I've not done....since I don't want to annoy the list with a test....is to actually reply to see if threading gets maintained. 

      
(We changed the users list to default to mime-style digests a few
months back.  We haven't had any complaints yet and I think that the
amount of replies to the standard digest have gone down.  We also
filter those, so they get flagged for moderator approval, which lets
us tell the poster not to reply to digests and saves long threads on
the merits of digests and etiquette. ;)
So why not change the Test list as well?

Now that I read the above I guess I should have subscribed her to this list's digest too...  :-)