mailman@manygoodideas.com writes:
I'm wondering how other admins have customized their digests to make them more useful.
It sounds like you have the digest format set to "plain". If you set it to "MIME", many email clients will format the display in such a way that you can click on individual messages. This is also possible with the plain format, but in my experience fewer clients implement that, because it's more fragile and painstaking to do. That might help.
In general, this problem is really hard to address because the capabilities of clients vary so greatly.
Perhaps your subscribers would be better off with single-message mode rather than digest mode. I'm not really clear on why anybody subscribes in digest mode any more. Digests still make sense for individual collections of messages, eg, "Your Honor, here are all the emails in which the defendent libeled my client." But for an ongoing stream such as a mailing list, I would think you would be much better off to receive the individual messages and let your modern client do its own thing with grouping threads and folders, and threading and ordering posts. Obviously, people like their own ways of doing things, but that suggestion might be useful for some of your subscribers.
I hate to ask you to ask your subscribers to learn how to use their clients, as that frequently doesn't go over well, and they'll probably ask you to teach them with a client you've never used yourself :-/. However, if that's an option, most email clients provide a way to "burst" the digest into individual messages, which will then be threaded in the normal way for that client. This provides the user with the "download all the recent messages periodically" benefits of the digest, as well as the threading capability of the client. Also, a *good* email client will provide a way to view a digest "as a folder", without bursting it into individual messages. The latter is closest to what your users want, I think. (I still think that for most of them switching to regular mode is best.)
Yahoo! Groups used to send out HTML digests that had the thread titles nicely distinguished, live links to the thread, and links to Reply to sender, Reply to All, etc.
Dealing with HTML email requires the resources of a billion-dollar company, unfortunately. It's a real mess. (For us old-timers, our favorite Mailman options are "strip HTML parts" and "convert HTML to plain text." ;-) For a small organization like Mailman, it's a "throw up your hands in distress" size problem. On the other hand, if you use a MIME-format digest, it's quite easy (but unfortunately not universal) for the client to implement that formatting itself. So that's the route we had to take.
Hope this helps. If it inspires more questions, please ask!
Steve