Digest Info
About the Digest
How it's made
FAQs
Digest Guidelines
Digest Acronyms
Sample 1
Sample 2
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The Digest
and how it's made
You may have wondered how the email digest works, who does what and
how it all comes together. I hope this will answer those questions.
To the right you can see Paul hard at work making this process run.
Although his office has at least 3 computers, he really only
needs one to do the job.. unless he wants to get fancy.
Luckily this job is not all tedium and pain. As people who have been
to Paul's house will tell you, it's a nice place to work. And the picture
below shows the view from Paul's office seat, in all he's doing
just fine... :-)
Logistically, it all starts with the list management software that runs
on our server. Your emails, when sent to that server, are preprocessed by
a program I wrote to strip out all the viruses, mail bounces, spam and other
trash that accumulates in an email account.
The messages that pass muster are sent on to both Keith and Paul. This allows
us to both comment and lets us switch off digest duty if required. It's also a
nice backup in case something goes wrong.
Paul gets your emails in his personal email queue, with a clue in
the subject that it came from the above source. If you ever send
a note to him directly that ends up in the digest, remember that it is may not
be completely clear what your intentions were, so if you want a note to be
private you'd better say so!
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Paul collects these emails into a single file, which may be run through an
email processing program that Keith wrote. That program strips the huge
volume of header data that is a side effect of internet traffic today,
and breaks the lines down to a hard width within the capabilities of the
outbound mailer.
Side note: many mailers today are very flexible about line lengths, and
most don't have a limit to line length. So Paul gets lines hundreds of
characters long. But the mailer only handles lines of 62 or so characters
in length. This program saves him manually editing those long lines back
to 62.
There are also various encoding schemes for special characters. Most common
is Mime encoding, which turns most punctuation into an =xx number. If
you know ascii it would be familiar... " is =94 and a space is =20. The
program reverts these to their ascii characters.
Finally Paul gets his hands on the text and does a manual edit of any
stuff left over. That stuff consists of two items: new forms of header
info that the internet has invented and HTML enclosures sent by people
who's mailers default to that mode.
This is why Paul asks folks to turn off their HTML option when sending to
the list. For guidelines for using the digest, check out
this page.
Paul also has this chance to put any personal comments into the digest,
which he will enclose [in square brackets]. If you have bracketed comments,
he'll thank you to use {curlies} or (parenthesis). He will also sift in any
comments taht Keith passes along, as always editing as he feels appropriate.
Finally the completed digest is sent off on the outbound leg of the
mailer's function. Another of Keith's programs grabs the outgoing digest, sends
it to all of the addresses in the list and saves a copy in the archives.
And that's all! Paul and I hope you enjoy the digest and the web page,
and we enjoy being able to help Cardinal owners come together. Thanks
for your support!
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