Digest form, HTML, plain text, edited messages

[Fred Blumenthal <xd2fabl...>]

Like Yoel Epstein, I get the World Music from a Jewish Point of View 
ListServ in digest form.  So on a recent date Yoel and I each received one 
e-mail instead of 50.  It isn't as instantaneous that way, but my e-mail 
in-box already looks like the bottom of a canary's cage, and with all 
those individual e-mails the situation would be worse, and I'd be 
overlooking some of the messages.  However, as Yoel mentions in digest 
2852, messages sent in HTML create a lot of extraneous HTML in the 
digests, and as a result the digests are far less than 50% new messages. 
As he suggested, I've switched to sending e-mail in Plain Text, and I hope 
that means I'll be contributing less extraneous HTML as a result. 

I would take his idea one step further, again particularly for the benefit 
of those of us who receive the ListServ in digest form.  My e-mail 
software, Lotus Notes, offers me the options of replying with or without 
attachments, with or without history, and replying to just the sender or 
to all.  Yours probably offers the same options.  I suggest the simplest 
form of reply, to jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org as Ari Davidow specified, 
(or 
off-list to a specific person if you so choose), certainly without 
attachments, and not "with history."  Quote one sentence to explain what 
you're talking about if necessary, and use the "Subject" line to help 
explain your message, but if you reply "with history" we get a whole lot 
of repeated material we've probably already read.  Besides, this way we 
can paraphrase "Rabbi Tarfon said, quoting Rabbi Ezekiel . . ."

Fred Blumenthal
xd2fabl (at) us(dot)ibm(dot)com

---------------------- jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org ---------------------+