Gail's comments about a busy list

[Guest guest]

On Sun, 25 Oct 1998 IAMAVIPTWO@... wrote:

>

> Hi : I don't know how to do this without replying to your letter either, new

> to this list.

deletions

> I'm

> interested in the news, but don't know how to respond to this volume of email

> I receive on this network. Some of it seems to be duplicates. what am I

> doing wrong? Gail in PA

>

Dear Gail: You're not doing anything wrong. You're just having a normal

reaction to a very busy mailinglist that has a lot of procedures that

take a few days to get used to. And I note that since writing this

message you've managed two more successful postings. You're doing fine.

HOWEVER, you requested (above) help on two problems:

I'll take the second one first: There ARE, in a sense, duplicate messages

on . The reason for this lies in the Internet custom of quoting,

in your reply, part of the message you are replying to. It is useful to

quote a small part of the message you're replying to, especially if a day

or two has elapsed since you received it. We all forget easily, and a

reply to a message that is not quoted in part can seem very mysterious!

Marta and I wish that members would get in the habit of deleting

unnecessary parts of the letter being replied to, even if all you did

was to delete the OneList advertisement at the end of each message (as

well as the trailer that tells how to consult the archives).

Aside from messages that are quoted in their entirety, there are NO

actual duplicate messages on (unles someone would transmit the

same message twice--no one has done that yet)

Now to comment on your OTHER point, about the " volume of mail " on

. Yes, this is a fairly busy list. You can ease this problem by

changing to a " digest " subscription subscription, VERY EASILY. If you

have a digest subscription, you get ALL the messages, in unabbbreviated

form (the word " digest " is something of a misnomer) BUNDLED TOGETHER IN

ONE TRAMSNISSION at the end of each day. If you want to try a digest

subscription, all you need to do is send an Email message, without a

subject header, and without anything whatever in the " body " of the

message, to:

-digestonelist

That's all they are to it, as they say. The message should be completely

blank!

If you decide you don't like your digest subscription, after trying it

for a day or two, send another blank message to:

-normalonelist

And you'll start getting messages all day long again!

Hoping this information will lighten the burden of a busy list.

With best wishes for good health,

Harry