At 6:55 PM -0400 10/6/00, David W. Tamkin is rumored to have typed:
Linda's original question left me wondering whether perhaps she wants to send a null digest
Urgh...I didn't think about that. It might be an interesting exercise to write (you'd need to replicate the functions of digest in writing a new digest.header, probably touching a blank digest.body, as well as manually manipulating the digest number and other stuff I've probably forgotten), but seems kinda overkill. I mean, wouldn't it be easier to simply send a note to the distribution list through the cron job's shell script than to try to kludge SmartList to send this notification, if one were really determined to do it? ("Sorry, kids, no one had anything intelligent to say today.") Besides, one could assume that those subscribed to a digested mailing list would _expect_ irregular deliveries as part of the package - multiple issues per day when things are hopping, none some days when things aren't. If they _don't_ understand this, maybe they should be subscribed to the interactive version of the mailing list instead. (Mind you, this coming from a guy who inherited a mailing list that is digest-only...) And _this_ leads us to one of my favorite topics; how much we're going to coddle our subscribers simply because they are new to the Internet and mailing lists. (An example is putting the [list name] in every subject so they can easily filter, when if they bothered to read the manual that comes with their mail client they'd realize they could filter just as easily on the X-Mailing-List: header field and survive quite nicely without it. Or setting the Reply-To: header field because they don't know how to Reply-To-All as another example. "I got a million of 'em...") Is there any justification for telling subscribers there hasn't been any activity for the last 24-hours? Charlie