Response format
Mary Sue Ittner (Tue, 24 Aug 2010 14:12:51 PDT)

Dear Ellen and Jim,

There are 237 members who receive this list in digest form. As many
of them have said repeatedly, reading messages when the whole
previous message is included is tedious, challenging, difficult. You
have so much to sort through to try to find the new responses. If
there are a lot of old messages, it is tempting just to hit delete
and not even try. They would like members of this list only to
include a small portion of the message or none at all. It's a matter
of common courtesy in my mind to attempt to make it easier for them
to read the messages from this list. It's much easier for people not
to include the message than it is to read through a mess of messages
with previous messages (sometimes several if a person has hit reply
and included the whole previous message that included another
previous message.) On those days when there are a lot of messages,
hitting reply to a digest that included all of the previous digest,
automatically generates a new digest. Neither of you get the digest
so it is easy for you to read the first part of the message and
ignore the rest so you may not fully appreciate what a pain it is. If
it is too hard for you to delete the previous message, instead of
hitting reply, you could hit the link that accompanies every pbs
message that automatically starts a new message and then just add the
appropriate subject heading.

I understand that occasionally people are in a hurry and will hit
reply without deleting the message. But there are some members of our
list in spite of my private requests not to do this, that would
really make a lot of people very happy if they changed their ways. :-)

Mary Sue
unsuccessful cat herder, aka pbs list administrator