Hi Tom,
What's the value of the digest?
From my point of view this is easy: one only gets one (big) message as
opposed to some 50-60 separate messages. Now, this may not make a lot of
sense still, but I'm receiving the digest via a Hotmail account, and it
costs a lot less downloading time overhead to display one big message, over
displaying the 50-60 separate messages. Furthermore, I find it easier to
quickly scroll down over messages belonging to a thread which doesn't
interest me.
It seems to be that all the digest does is make the list less convenient.
If you filter the OM messages to their own folder, then you have your
'digest', but in a manner that is more clear. No loss of continuity.
This is the way I used to do it when I had my work address subscribed to the
list. This way also works fine, but I just couldn't resist directly checking
my mail whenever I saw Outlook popping up one of these little envelopes in
Window's status bar (not even when I was in the middle of some complex
programming task). Then, with the amount of messages coming in daily, I
found it to be too distracting to read it this way. Nowadays, first thing I
do in the morning is to grab some coffee and read over the 2-3 digests that
are waiting for me. This process does actually save me a lot of time and
distraction, but maybe that's just the case for me :)
Seems like it is the same amount of time to download too.
True. The total download time for the messages alone would be about equal
(esp. on a fast connection), nonetheless there's a substantial overhead when
reading the messages via a browser, so there's definitely some gain there...
A big disadvantage of being in digest mode, BTW, is that you're likely to
miss out on really cool FS stuff, as the best bits of course get picked out
directly (which I think is fair enough). Also, in digest mode you can't
really create a kill file (not that I use one, but I can see why in your
case it might be desirable to do so ;) ), so that's a bit of a disadvantage
too when some people start picking on you...
Cheers!
Olafo
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