Thanks to John Alleyn-Day for describing the plight of us digesters. I
subscribe to several lists, at work and at home. Clearly, most listers receive
MAIL and not DIGEST on these lists as they frequently suggest that "all you
have to do is hit the delete key"; that indicates that they do not understand.

Jeff Kell (did Danny welcome you properly to Louisiana?) explained how the
digest works automatically. One additional point: the digest inserts a table
of contents at the beginning. If there are several posts with exactly the same
subject, the table of contents lists it once and indicates how many posts in
this digest are on the same topic. If your mailer add "re: " when you reply,
take the trouble to remove it, as that makes a different subject.

What I do is look at the table of contents and use the Find facility,
available to me here at work in cc:Mail and at home in Eudora Pro to scroll
down to all the posts on that topic of interest. Aside from not having to read
posts that are of no interest, I can follow a thread effectively.

It's ironic that listers who are upset about SPAM and other off-topic posts
merely extend everyone else's pain by writing to the list -- and then other
people reply to that complaint!  Can't we stop that? If it's SPAM, Jeff has
already noticed it and done what can be done. If you think that someone
crossed the line with a post, just send a note to the poster and not the list.
That will cut down the traffic, the length of digests, get down to our
exchange of HP3000 ideas, share the occasional joke (properly marked in the
subject), etc.

About the suggestion to read the moderated list, Jeff just posted a notice of
its demise.

Leonard Berkowitz