With a "regular" subscription, you receive individual postings by email as they are processed by the list server.
With a "digest" subscription, you receive larger messages (called "digests") at regular intervals, usually once per day or once per week. These "digests" are collections of individual list postings. Some lists are so active that they produce several digests per day. 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 individual postings. There are three different formats you may choose from:
- Digest (traditional format) messages are in plain text
- Digest (MIME format) "bursts" the individual messages out of the digest so you can read them separately (select only if your mail client understands MIME)
- Digest (HTML format) messages are in HTML (requires an HTML mail client such as Outlook or Windows Live Mail)
With an "index" subscription, you receive short indexed email messages at regular intervals, usually once per day or once per week. These "indexes" show you what is being discussed on the list, without including the text of the individual postings. For each posting, the date, the author's name and address, the subject of the message and the number of lines is listed. You can then download messages of interest from the list server (the index contains instructions on how to do that). An index subscription is ideal if you have a slow connection or generally only read a few hand-picked messages. The indexes are very short and you do not have to worry about long download times. The drawback of course is that you need to download messages of interest from the server. There are two different formats you may choose from:
- Index (traditional format) messages are in plain text
- Index (HTML format) messages include hyperlinks to view/download the entire text (requires an HTML mail client such as Outlook or Windows Live Mail)
With a "No Mail" subscription, you do not receive messages from the list, but if it is a discussion list, you may post. It is often referred to as "Vacation Mode" and is generally used to temporarily stop receiving messages from the list while you are away. If you are subscribed to the list under more than one email address, it can also be used so you do not receive multiple copies of messages.