Re: “Get rid of digests”

[J.B. Nicholson]

Dmitry Alexandrov wrote:
> Is there something wrong with them per se?  Except, that most of the
> people have no clue how to use them properly, I mean.

I find that most MUAs don't handle digests well and this creates needless 
thread breaking. I don't blame the software mishandling on the user. 
Digests also lead to followup posts with excessive quoted material from 
people who don't edit out the superfluous text. That I do blame on the 
user, as they could take time to edit that out, but I also blame on digests 
because the digesting (by its nature) gives users so much more text to work 
with.

I don't believe digests have been in high demand for the past decade or so 
(based on what I have seen of the mailing lists I've administered). These 
days people seem to have no problem getting email accounts with high 
quotas. Storage seems to only get cheaper per volume with time. So I don't 
find storage-related arguments to be convincing. Paying for bandwidth to 
the endpoint also strikes me as a poor argument; people don't seem to 
object to using webmail or mail client protocols which do a good job of 
letting people download the specific set of emails they want to read (IMAP, 
for example, and I think JMAP looks like it will continue in this way).

Taken as a whole, I'm convinced that whatever benefit came from mailing 
list digests has passed and thus support for digested mailing is not worth 
taking on the complexity of "proper" (as you say) implementation or use.