More of this Feature • Part 1: Order to the Chaos • Part 2: Moderated vs Anarchic • Part 3: Discussion vs Announcement • Part 4: Open vs Closed

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Lots of Mail

On Marina's lang-dang list, every message is distributed to all members of the list (more or less) at once. All the list members get the individual postings submitted to the list as they are coming in to the server.

Thus, the lang-dang list may be called an individual-message list; since this way of distributing the mails is usually considered the "default", lists that are configured that way usually do not carry a special name.

As both member count and traffic on the lang-dang list increased, some started to complain about the large number of mail they received. Marina knew how to help this.

In Just One Message

Marina set up a parallel list to the lang-dang list: lang-dang-digest. This special list would collect all messages sent to lang-dang during one day, build a nice digest of them and send it, just one single message containing all contributions to the list during the past 24 hours, to the list members.

The lang-dang-digest made it possible for busy (?) people to stay abreast of what's new with discussion about "langue dangereuse" by reading merely one email message per day. If they replied to (part of) this digest, their answer would be sent to the lang-dang list and, consequently, appear in the digest as well.

Summary

While the "normal" version of a mailing list distributes all messages to all members at once, a digest collects the mail sent to the list during a set period of time to send out a collection of these individual messages.

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