How to participate in mailing list I'm receiving as digest?

Question

I've found that I love receiving messages from mailing lists using the 'digest' format, just giving me one consolidated daily read instead of constant inbox clutter and distractions.

However, how do I reply to email I'm receiving this way? It's easy if I've started the thread, since I'm kept on CC and can just keep replying to the messages I get sent back to me. But what if someone asks a question and I want to answer them and quote their message? Is there some way to do this?

I'm on lists using "Mailman, the GNU Mailing List Manager" as well as google groups and yahoo groups.

Answer 1

Most of the mailing list digests I've seen in the past allow you to quote the entire email, then you need to manually trim out anything you don't want as part of the message. In fact, it's preferred that you trim out any messages that aren't related to the one your responding to at the very minimum; so you aren't quoting huge blocks of text that is unnecessary for your response.

I've also seen the digests give either a "Table of Contents" for the subjects of the emails in the digest, and/or each email will have the subject associated with it. Remember to change the subject line of your email from being "Re: <Digest of Mailing list name>" to "Re: <Subject of specific thread responding to>".

Both of these are more netiquette based responses. For more specifics on the methods on how to respond, usually just hit the reply/reply-to-all feature of your email program. The reply-to address for most mailing list digests is designed to go to he main list instead of the digest address.