Some egroups mail stuff

[Brooks A. Rowlett]

No: HPFGUIDX 100

Brooks here.  Brooksindy on Yahoo, brooksar at indy.net on my 'home' account.

I am a long time egroups user, and an adminstrator in three groups, and
want to mention some important stuff.

1) If you are getting the list via email, you can set your mail to
'Digest', so when about 25 messages accumulate, depending on their size;
or once a day, whichever comes first, a digest will be sent out.  The
digest has all the text of the messages, but no attachments.  (In fact I
think it would be best if this group was set that way for all
messages.... I think a large group not devoted to file exchange, is
better served going that route - for one thing it prevents accidental
attachments of overlarge files; for another it prevents virus
transmission.  So I recommend the listowners do that).  

The advantage to digest is that all the headers are stripped off
individual messages, so you get a slightly smaller storage usage if you
leave things in your inbox, as a batch of messages are grouped together.
 The disadvantage is, messages may not be as timely, and it puts some
responsiblity on you when replying.

2) If you get Digest mode, which I have already set my subscription to,
make sure your reply does NOT automatically quote the message you are
replying to - else you will send that entire digest back to the group. 
Which will then show up in the next digest too.  If the founders don't
yell at you, other people will.

If you are going to reply to one or more messages in a digest, it is
most polite to copy and paste the topic of the individual message into
your subject line; and similarly to copy and paste to quote only the
portions of that individual message, not the whole Digest. (This is a
sore point for me on some lists, hence my emphasis on it.)

3) You can set your profile to not be shown to the group.  The main
point of profiles are to ID yourself to other members in some way if you
care to, and to ID yourself and assert you are of sufficient age, in
restricted groups.

Micros**t Lookout! (yeah, I know it is really backwards from that, but
let's face it, Lookout! is what you have to do every time you use it
thanks to viruses and the like) and some other mailers can be set to
send mail formatted with HTML.  MS's even defaults to that, I believe. 
PLEASE TURN THAT OFF WHEN SENDING TO EGROUPS.  Many people still use
text-based readers, and having HTML puts in a lot of extraneous
characters and more than doubles the size of a message.  More than that,
the digest are automatically sent out as plain text only, so anybody who
gets those will have to wade through that HTML formatting even if they
normally do read mail with HTML active.  It's a pain and a waste.  So
find the place in the preference or options of whatever you use for mail
that says "send mail formatted with html" or "Send mail in plain text
only" and make sure that you are set to text only.  Turn HTML off. 
(That is probably the mail format problem that was mentioned earlier.)  

Administrators   you have my permission to quote and modify this to put
in the List FAQ and any 'welcome to this group ' auto-send file you create.

-Brooks