Digests collect a whole day's, week's, or month's postings in one email.

The default delivery mode for most mailing list subscriptions is to copy subscribers on each email sent to the list in near real-time, just a few seconds or minutes after it was delivered to the list server. This mode can be particularly useful if the list is time sensitive, such as with a news or financial information service, where the immediate delivery is an advantage and gives you the option of reading the email right away or waiting till later if you wish at your option.

However, many discussion lists are less time-sensitive, and you might prefer to read a daily, weekly, or monthly digest of all of the days postings in a single message. Most lists provide a digest option, and, together with filtering your lists, digests enable you to greatly reduce mailing list traffic volume and therefore usefully manage more lists than otherwise.

Remember when replying to a posting in a digest that you will need to cut out the rest of the postings before and after the one you are replying to so you don't append the entire digest to your reply.

Mailing lists often provide web based options to configure digest mode. The following sections describe how to set this mode with the major list servers:

• Listserv Digest

• Majordomo Digest

• Listproc Digest.