[Nut-upsuser] [Nut-upsdev] Proposal to raise ML digest threshold

[Bruce Pleat]

I receive the digest because I'm not normally involved in urgent or
important discussions, just participating as I can contribute or need help,
so take my post with the appropriate level of (un)importance.

Not that I'm that active on this list in particular, but I've been active
in the Email space for (checks watch) {censored} too many years, and BBS
before our dear Internet.

Digests with K-size-based limits were great when email was purely 6.5-bit
ASCII.  Once RTF and HTML were popular, let alone fancier CSS and inline
messages, even the smallest of messages can become larger than a meagre
30K.  (I call it 6.5-bit ASCII because the supported values were basically
$20-$7F, since $00-$1F were "special".)

A 5MB-or-daily rotation makes sense, if nobody ever attaches logs or
anything fancier than 6.5-bit ASCII. Once we get into 8-bit (characters in
popular Latin languages), 16-bit, or even 24-bit (gotta love Unicode), and
the encoding necessary for SMTP (still 6.5-bit ASCII), then you're into
MIME - and possibly multi-part MIME.  Once you're there, it's just an
Eudoran leap to far more than 30K for many of even the simplest of NUTty
messages.




On Fri, May 16, 2025 at 4:43 PM Greg Troxel via Nut-upsuser <
nut-upsuser at alioth-lists.debian.net> wrote:

> Jim Klimov via Nut-upsdev <nut-upsdev at alioth-lists.debian.net> writes:
>
> > Are there many digest subscribers currently active? WDYT about raising
> the
> > size threshold significantly (500K? more?) or abolishing it and just
> going
> > for one digest per day?
> >
> > I guess the setting is there to make heated discussions (much traffic)
> > visible faster. I suppose it does not impact people receiving every
> message
> > independently.
>
> Either that or avoiding really big digests.
>
> I say set the size threshold to 5 MB and that makes it one digest per
> day.
>
>
> I also say, not that you asks, that digests are problematic, because
> people reply and quote the entire digest.  Really you need an MUA that
> splits them, and then if you have filtering into folders that's just
> extra work, as the scarce resource these days is human time, not mail
> delivery.  So I would be tempted to just not have digests.  Having
> ranted thusly, I must admit that I don't remember seeing
> quoted-whole-digests on nut lists.
>
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