6.4 Digests

A digest is a message that contains other messages. Special MH-E commands let you read digests conveniently. You can use SPC and BS to page through the digest as if it were a normal message, but if you wish to skip to the next message in the digest, use D SPC (mh-page-digest). To return to a previous message, use D BS (mh-page-digest-backwards).

Another handy command is D b (mh-burst-digest). This command uses the MH command burst²¹ to break out each message in the digest into its own message. Using this command, you can quickly delete unwanted messages, like this: Once the digest is split up, toggle out of MH-Folder Show mode with t (see Folders) so that the scan lines fill the screen and messages aren’t displayed. Then use d (see Reading Mail) to quickly delete messages that you don’t want to read (based on the ‘Subject:’ header field). You can also burst the digest to reply directly to the people who posted the messages in the digest. One problem you may encounter is that the ‘From:’ header fields are preceded with a ‘>’ so that your reply can’t create the ‘To:’ field correctly. In this case, you must correct the ‘To:’ field yourself. This is described later (see Editing Drafts).