Hi Bill,

On Nov 23, 12:51pm, Bill Smoldt wrote:
> Subject: Re: Replying to e-mails
> Actually, the way other high-volume lists work is that the consumer of the
> answers is responsible for replying to the entire list with a summary of the
> correct answers and acknowledgement of the individuals who provided the
> correct information.  That way, no one has to state that they would like an
> answer to the question as Tina stated - it is understood that it will be
> posted.
>
> The advantage to this method is that the list isn't cluttered with duplicate
> and/or wrong answers, but the final correct answer is summarized - the one
> that really fixed the problem.
>
Nice thoughts, but I think the biggest problem of this list is the
unneccessary inclusion of text from previous postings.   Take your
message (sorry, Bill) as an example:  New contents: 36 lines. Total
length: 98 lines.

I am subscribed to the digest, thus I get one big e-mail a day.  The
average size (weekends excluded) has been 4000+ lines.  I once tried
to reduce the size to the minimum, by removing all "> " lines.  The
disgest shrunk to less than 1/3 of it's original size.  Than I was
more careful, removed only the indentation marks ("> "), ran the
result through sort and uniq, counting the number of times every line
appeared in the digest.  For some lines it was 20+ times, mainly due
to the fact that whole messages were included at the end of other
messages.

I am not voting against including messages, but I would vote against
including whole messages, especially if they are included at the end,
without direct reference to the new message.  If only the lines one
refers to were included, the size of the digest would dramatically
decrease.

> [...stuff deleted...]
>
> At least the list is extraordinary useful, even in this form.  And it's fun
> to see the wrong answers along with the right ones.  We've got a great bunch
> of people here.
>
I agree.

Just my $0.02,
Bernd

--
# Bernd Dammann         <bernd AT kemi.dtu DOT dk> | "Why stop now,
# Bernd Dammann         <bernd AT kemi.dtu DOT dk> | "Why stop now,
# Department of Chemistry                   |      just when I am hating it?"
# The Technical University of Denmark       |---------------------------------
# Building 207                              | phone: (+45) 45 25 24 81
# DK-2800 Lyngby, Denmark                   | http://www.fki.dtu.dk/~bernd/
    print unpack("u", "<22!K;F5W('1H870@>6]U)VQL(&1O('1H870A\"@``" );