Digest format unfortunately useless

Email digests are a great way to compress traffic.
Unfortunately, the digest NB's delivers at the moment
are essentially useless for me, at least.

The attached screenshot shows what I see in Thunderbird
on an XP box.

Note that attachments list has taken up all of the screen
space, and there is no scroll bar. So none of the messages
can be seen.

When the message text /is/ present, it's generally too small
to be useful, and difficult to resize due to the attachments
list.

True, Thunderbird's handling of this many attachments could
be improved. But the basic problem is in way digests are
created because:

    a) Making "attachments" out of them creates a super
       long list like this that is kind of pointless.

    b) The "index" such as it is the list of attachments,
       but you can see that not enough title text is showing
       to make it useful in any way.

    c) Lacking a readable index, the only alternative is
       to scroll down through the entire, lengthy message,
       which pretty well defeats the purpose. The whole
       goal of a digest is to have a readable index that
       you can easily scan for interesting stuff, and
       which lets you delete all of the threads at once
       if there is nothing you care about.

So I'm off to unsubscribe. But I hope that mailing
list manager improves, at some point. (The ones Yahoo
provides are exemplary.)



-- 

Eric Armstrong, Document Systems Architect, Sun Microsystems
http://blogs.sun.com/coolstuff
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/index.jsp?blogger=cooltools


-- 

Eric Armstrong, Document Systems Architect, Sun Microsystems
http://blogs.sun.com/coolstuff
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/index.jsp?blogger=cooltools