[imp] horde Digest format, replies

[Jens-U. Mozdzen]

Zitat von Michael M Slusarz <slusarz at horde.org>
> [...]
> MIME Digests are preferred to help you *read* the list traffic.  They
> aren't designed to be easy to reply to.
>
> Plain text digests are harder to read, but easier to edit when replying.
>
> Not much you can do about that.  A good MUA should only ever generally
> reply to text in the "body" part (i.e. the first readable message
> part), which is what IMP does.
>
> A MUA could be designed to allow individual replying to a
> multipart/digest part via the original "master" message address.
> However this is a *very* specific operation that would not be used by
> many people, so at least for purposes of IMP it is not a priority.

I understand that point and didn't want to make a fuzz about it. It  
just hit my eyes that mailman declares MIME format as preferred (as  
you can tell, I was checking that setting, in order to turn it off -  
turning it on was a user error in the first place), while handling it  
was sub-optimum ;)

I fully agree on priority (which in my eyes is currently "zero").  
Whenever someone is looking for a "Horde summer of code" task,  
implementing mailing list awareness for IMP could be an option :D (I  
think that ML traffic is not that seldomly seen in our circles).

> Quite honestly, IMHO it is much easier to read a list via individual
> message anyway.  If using mail filters to filter your mailing list
> messages into separate mailboxes, there is very little (if any)
> benefit from using a digest.

On some of my small-factor clients, the support for sub-folders in  
mailboxes is "making me unhappy". So new mail must go into INBOX only,  
where individual messages cause too much noise. That's a personal  
decision, just my 0.02 €.

Zitat von  Ralf Lang <lang at b1-systems.de>
> In some projects I follow, replying to digests is discouraged because
> it usually does not include the threading-related stuff and often even
> the topics are not adjusted. Nobody wants to guess after a week or so
> if the activesync-related mail was in topic "Digest of week 20" or
> "Digest of 2013-03-05".

Yes, although I'm fully aware of the problems such mis-use causes to  
others, even I sometimes miss all required changes (<rant>amongst  
others: change the IMP user profile to a "no signature" one</rant>)  
when replying to MLs at late hours or when in a rush.

<dream style="thoughts: free-flow;">It's be nice if someone would  
develop a Horde application that
- can be used to register a mailing list subscription
- checks if such a subscription is already available in a shared  
folder the user has access to
- organizes to filter corresponding messages into some common,  
eventually even shared folder, eventually "unpacking" digests if  
required.
- offers a web-based reader/responder interface on a per message base.
</dream>

Let's close this topic before someone gets a false impression... it  
was started by my irony detector ;)

Regards,
Jens