Hi all,
I (and I’m sure many of you) subscribe to daily digests from NANOG to keep things concentrated. However, there are sometimes messages in the digest I’d like to reply to, and I don’t want to be that guy who just replies to the digest and opens an ugly new thread.
Curious what workflow/process any of you use to do so, and what the best/netizen-polite way is to end up with a reply that’s appropriately threaded. Do I just need to mirror the subject line?
Generally speaking, you want to trim the digest to the relevant posts, bottom posting your reponse (if you’re interested in nitpicking). This practice was prevalent until Microsoft Outlook introduced the top post culture. Let’s not go down that rabbit hole.
Additionally, editing the subject line to include what you’re responding about can be helpful.
This, and change your subscription to individual messages for the
duration. You need the message-id and related headers to create a
properly threaded reply and you don't have them. Few will notice and
none will harangue you for starting a new thread with your first reply
but if you do it with every reply it gets really old really fast.
Regards,
Bill Herrin
See Bill, now you’re speaking my old school bottom posting, mutt using geek language.
Does nanog have a mime digest format so you get one big email with all the emails of the day attached as separate eml? Then all you do is select just the particular email you want to reply to and there you are.
–srs
Appreciate all the input everyone! It’s helpful
Suresh - great pointer - it looks like they do. I didn’t even notice it as an option. I think this will be the fastest/easiest method for me in webmail-land. Thanks for pointing that out!
It’s been decades since the last time I used this option… and that was on an actual listserv run on lsoft.com, early 2000s.
These days just subscribed from a gmail because threaded posts, keyboard shortcuts for email actions and what not. Makes it very easy to handle high traffic mailing lists.
–srs
It’s been decades since the last time I used this option… and that was on an actual listserv run on lsoft.com, early 2000s.
Yes… Digest modes are generally unsuitable for active participation in a mailing list.
I think the entire purpose of Digest mode is to minimize traffic for users who are interested
solely in skimming through everything that was written days or weeks after discussion
took place. You would not have any good or convenient way to pick an item out of
a text digest to answer it, and you don’t have the latest responses if it’s still an active
conversation at the time you are reading the digest.
I would say you should always switch Off digest mode before posting anything,
and just wait up to a day to receive a new post on that thread to reply to.
Make sure to check mailing list archives for replies during the time between your
most recent received digest and the Time you turned off the feature.
You may very well find that someone else has written what your planned reply was going
to say, and you didn’t see that part of the conversation yet because you were in digest mode.
If Nobody posts to the thread for you to reply to, then make a New post of your own after
waiting an entire 24 hours, but manually copy the re: Subject. It will break the thread
in the same way as if you’re still using older email software that was never updated to add
support for the new References: and In-reply-to: headers introduced in 2001.
I use dedicated email addresses for each mailing list that I’m on so that I can file accordingly and thus, don’t need to use digests.
