Choosing Your Mail Subscription Type

Below are the types of mail offered by EFFORTS. To make EFFORTS work best for you, you should choose a subscription type that best fits your personal preferences and computer setup. The three most common subscription types are: Regular, Digest, and Index (HTML).
To request assistance or change your subscription type, please send a message to efforts-request@effortslist.org.

Regular Mail
With a "regular" subscription, you receive individual postings immediately, as they are submitted. Typically, you will receive many relatively short postings throughout the day, and the accumulated postings will be displayed whenever you open your mail program. (We can show you how to easily keep EFFORTS mail separate from all your other personal mail.) Finally, you need to be online to efficiently read the postings.

Digest
With a "digest" subscription, you receive only a few (but longer) messages, called digests. These digests are collections of individual postings prefaced by a brief Table of Contents. Digests are a good compromise between reading everything as it is posted and feeling like the list is clogging your mailbox with a multitude of accumulated individual postings. (Also, you can save the digest to a file, then read them and compose your replies offline if you have only limited connect time available.)

Index (HTML format)
With an "index" subscription, you also receive only a few message per day, but these are very short "index" messages. These indexes show you what is being discussed on the list, without including the actual text of the individual postings. For each posting, its date, author, subject, length (number of lines), and a hyperlink to the actual message is listed. You can then scan the index and read any message of interest by simply clicking on its hyperlink. An index subscription is ideal if you have a slow connection, a small mailbox capacity, or read only a few hand-picked messages. The indexes are very short and you do not have to worry about long download times or filling your mailbox. (You must, of course, be connected while reading the messages of interest.)