discuss Mailing List: Problem With Digest Mode for Messages

[Jay Sage, 2022 Conference Webmaster (webmaster]

Several people have reported a problem with list messages that they receive in digest mode.

On the conference website page about the Discussion List, we give several reasons for our strong recommendation against selecting digest mode for the conference discussion list. Nevertheless, it seems that many people reflexively change from the default setting of individual messages to the digest mode, even though this list rarely has more than one message per day.

Most email programs today (including mine) write messages in HTML (like a web page) rather than plain text. This allows the messages to have multiple fonts, text decoration (e.g., underlining), bulleted lists, indented sections, quotations, etc. The digest mode has some difficulty in collecting multiple individual HTML messages into a single digest message.

For those of you who selected digest mode and have missed messages, you can go to the message archive as described on the Discussion List page. There is a "View Message Archive" link under the "Quick Links" section.

In going through the list setup screens just now, I discovered a setting for the digest mode that may partially correct this problem. I think that it might allow the HTML content to be collected at the end of the digest subject-line list.

A better solution, to my mind, would be to turn off digest mode by changing your settings (see the "Change Settings / Recover Password" link in the "Quick Links" section.

-- Jay

Jay Sage
Webmaster, IAJGS 2022 Virtual Conference
webmaster [at] iajgs2022.org