About digests

Group members who receive group messages by email can choose to receive digests of messages rather than receive each message individually as it is sent. You can choose to receive digests in HTML (full-featured) format or in plain text format. Alternatively, you can choose to receive daily summaries that list the topics and replies that were posted to the group the previous day. These settings are under Email Delivery on your Subscription page for the group.

To generate digests, the system groups a day’s messages into batches of 12 and delivers each batch in one digest message when the twelfth message is posted. The digests include the full text of each message, omitting any quotes of previous messages.

Note: If a digest had not been generated in the previous 6 hours and messages were posted to the group since the last digest, a digest is created at 6:00 AM local time for each member, based on the timezone in the member’s account preferences.

Full-featured digests

The top of a full-featured digest includes a list of the topics it contains. Each topic listed is a link you can click to go directly to that topic within the digest. If a topic has a number after it, that number is the count of messages in the topic that are included in the digest.

Example

After the list of topics are the messages that were posted, with a footer after each message. For more information, see Footers in digests.

Note: In a full-featured digest, the number of images included per message is limited to two. All other message attachments are included as links to the group’s website.

Plain text digests

The top of a plain text digest includes a list of the topics it contains. The topics in that list are not links. If a topic has a number after it, that number is the count of messages in the topic that are included in the digest.

The group’s email address, group web address, and unsubscribe web address might appear as links (as in the example below) if your email application automatically creates links from text that appears to be email addresses or web addresses.

Example

After the list of topics are the messages that were posted, with a footer after each message. For more information, see Footers in digests.

Daily summaries

A daily summary contains a list of messages (topics or replies) that were posted the previous day. Unlike the digests, the summary does not include the text of any of the messages. For replies to an existing topic, the summary contains a link to the topic, not to the individual reply.

The summary is created at 6:00 AM local time for each member, based on the timezone in the member’s account preferences.