Re: Hello (mail digests)

Below I give my considered opinion of MH's digest operatons, and a proposal
for a much productive and efficient use of them, with only three additional
functions.

Re: > > Xavier Maillard <xma <at> gnu.org> wrote:
> >  .....
> >  ..
> > 3. How can I answer a message *directly* from a digest message
> > -i.e. without having to burst it first ?
> 
Bill Said > Bursting is the way to go.
> http://mh-e.sourceforge.net/manual/mh-e.html#Digests
> 

I do use disgests.  And unfortunately MH's and by the way MH-E's functionaly for handling digests in very
crude.  

Take for example the above method.
   (1) you have to burst a whole digest of say from 10 to 20 or so messages into your
       mail folder.
   (2) Find the message in there that you wanted to respond to, bring it up and
   (3) respond to it.

   (4) Then you either have to manually, erase all the irrelavant msgs that 
       were also bursted out, or just let them clog up your mail folder.

----
As a result I envision  a future for MH-E that would handle digests more efficiently.

For example I would like to see the following "Henman" recommendations for easy and
    efficient digest message reading and processing implemented.
   - burst or extract operation that would extract a specific digest msg or range.

    D b <msg#> | 'all' | <msg-range>
or  B  <msg#> | 'all' | <msg-range>

And for viewing a specific message in a digest, a goto msg in digest function
Rather than repeated  D <SPC> s I would like to see

    D g <msg#>       D g 0   this is a zero it takes you to the top of the digest,.
or  G <msg#> 

And for responding to a certain msg in a digest..

    D r <msg#>
or  R  <msg#>

or some other intuitive, yet easy to key command sequences.

In summary, additional digest functions desired (by me as a digest user) are:

   digest-burst    <msg#> | 'all' | <msg-range>
   digest-goto     <msg#>
   digest-respond  <msg#>

The specific command key sequence can be worked out.

I need to read up on Gnu's MH program "burst", to see if it allows randge or not.
I am not familar with nmh's burst program.

Even if neither has a range function for example you only want a few messages extracted from a digest, it
should be possible (expensive but) to burst all to a temp dir and then if order is preserved pick the digest
msg of number # out,.

With this functionality, the usage of digests would propable increase a lot.  Right now it is a pain to
responsd to or extract or goto a specific message, in my opinion.

I'd like to here comments on this proposal for new digest features.

Regards,
  darel henman

--

p.s. Also if MH-E doesn't have it introduce a variable for digest message seperator character,if
characters other then '-' are premitted, and a variable telling how many times it must be repeated in order
to be recognized as a msg delimiter.  The reason 
is I find that burst, at least Gnu Mailutils MH burst will produce, understandably bizarre extraction of
messages from a digest (for example and emacs list digest) which contains patches (these frequently
contain a series of 3 '-'s).  I should think that
 nmh's burst would behave the same.  To solve this I specify a larger sequence of hyphens to delinate
messages. Also note that the common end of message before signature is two hyphens, i.e., "--"  this alow
will/can confuse burst. 

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