I agree that the digest is difficult to read. That's one reason I prefer to read the list through the archives. But some list members use an email format that gets scrambled in the archive (but not, for some reason, in the digest). When that happens to a post in a thread that I'm interested in, it's easy to check the appropriate digest email to read the post.
If I only read the list from home, I'd probably use the individual postings format, with a filter to shunt the CR messages to a separate folder. But I also read the list from work and other locations. I think it's a lot easier to just use the archives than to fool around with a web-based email server and have to wade through all the individual emails or lose track of other emails in the comparative flood of CR traffic.
Kerrigan Bennett Pleasant Hill, CA USA, where I have the uneasy feeling that someone is going to tell me I'm off topic . . . or that there's a bikeforums site more appropriate for the discussion of these email management issues.
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The problem with the digest format is that much of the digest is untrimmed replies. So you have to scroll through a lot of posts that you've already read. Some days this can be the majority of the digest. I recently changes from digest to individual postings and found the going through them faster, now I delete after the message and not deal with the untrimmed earlier postings at all.