>Submitted to veg-raw by: Shawn Luca <[log in to unmask]> >Is there a possibility of getting a digest form of this list? I really enjoy >reading the messages, but they seem to be starting to pile up. A digest >form may help keep our mailboxes uncluttered. I had this same complaint a month or two ago, and a digest mode would most definitely be appreciated. However, in the meantime it dawned on me there is an alternative solution for those of you with commercial versions of the most popular email programs. If you have an email program like Eudora Pro on the Mac or Pegasus on the PC, check out the filtering feature. I didn't realize one could do this until I upgraded recently from the shareware form of Eudora which lacks the filters. Perhaps many of the rest of you are still in the same boat I was with no filtering capability. But if you have filters, you can simply have your email program automatically slot postings from different sources into their own mailboxes. (Normally with email lists there some identifying feature, usually the "Reply-To" name or address, you can have the mail filtered on.) This is actually even better than a digest, because you retain the individual subject headers this way, while many digests do not extract a summary of subject headers, forcing you to page through all the mail yourself to see if you want to read each posting or not. Also, for those of you newer to the internet making multiple daily posts, consider the following two points of tried-and-true "netiquette" for staying in everyone else's good graces: 1. It is considered "bad form" to make many small replies responding to each individual list posting, not only because it takes up bandwidth but also because it plasters your name all over the list subject headings. This will quickly get you regarded as a pest, and many will quit reading your postings. Solution: it takes a bit more work, but the preferred tack is to package up one's various replies into a single posting, and simply indicate in the subject header in abbreviated form what individual items you are responding to. If you start making more than, say, a couple of posts or so a day, you need to consider the barrage-effect and the irritation your postings are going to cause others on the list. 2. It's also bad form to insert extremely lengthy reply-quotes of previous postings you are responding to, especially when followed by responses of only a few lines. Again, it wastes bandwidth plus it will piss a lot of people off because it gets old real fast having to page down through reams of stuff one has already read, just to locate the new response someone is adding. If it's not possible to capture the essence of a point you are responding to with a reply-quote of AT MOST 5-10 lines (hopefully towards the lower end of that range if not less), then you're trying to say too much all at once. People's memories for what has been posted are better than one might think--and if they are not, usually a few lines of reply-quote is enough to jog them About a year ago I found a very funny and informative Miss-Manners-style satire FAQ of net behavior that will catch you up on these sorts of things if you're not yet already aware of them through the school of hard knocks. Just ask me for the "Dear Emily Postnews" satire, and I'll fire you off a copy. It was originally written with the Usenet newsgroups in mind, but most of it also applies to email lists like this one. --Ward Nicholson <[log in to unmask]> Wichita, KS