What Is the Difference Between Abridged Email & Digest Email for Google Group?

Google's free Groups service allows you to join groups to communicate with others from around the world or your local community. When you subscribe to a group, you can choose how you wish to receive updates: in your browser or via email. Google provides several email delivery options, including abridged email and email digests.

Google Groups is an online community and mailing list service. Users can create groups that others can join. These groups may be based criteria including location, common interest or vocation. The users can post messages and files to the groups. Google, like other group services, allows you to view the content of your group within your browser or subscribe to email updates from your group.

Google describes abridged email updates as a single email summary of new activity -- including messages from users and administrators -- per day. Digest email shows the full content of up to 25 messages in a single email per day. While you can see the sender, subject and a brief summary with abridged emails, you can view all text and images from all group activity in the digest email. For groups that have more than 25 new messages, you will receive multiple digests.

To change your email settings for a Google Group to which you belong, log on to the group in your Web browser. Click "My Membership" to open a screen where you can change email and other settings. Select either abridged or digest from the options. Google also allows you to choose the "no email" option if you only want to check your groups in your browser or "email" to receive a message every time someone posts to your group. Email settings are on a group-by-group basis so you can choose the settings for each group individually.

If you simply want to reduce the number of email messages in your inbox, you may choose the abridged email delivery option. You may find that the summary saves you time by helping you choose the messages you really need to fully read. However, if summaries don't provide you with enough information, consider subscribing only to the digest. Note that because digests contain the full text, they may be much larger and require more time to download. Especially busy groups may also send you multiple digests per day.