Ro,
You are missing the whole point, of not wanting to deal with multiple
edited emails. Most edits are not done for erroneous info, but for
spelling error or to add new info.
Playing devil's advocate for a bit longer, why not put those members on individual moderation. Then you can reject their edits and tell them why. If they clean up their act you can take them back off moderation.
That resolves the flood-of-trivial-edits problem, at least outside of the moderator pool, without removing the functionality for cases when it makes sense.
(Yeah, I know, there I go again presuming that members of other people's groups can be trained.)
so there is no reason not to do a new post in the same thread if its
important, and if its not, then it will be let go, which is what we
want.
Well, there is, as Dano pointed out: even if posted in the same thread the correcting message doesn't hide the erroneous information. Someone finding the original post wouldn't necessarily know that they should read down the thread to see if there is a correction later. But that has a much lower importance in a group which is primarily read by email, and the archive is not treated as a repository of knowledge.
This points to my "One size does not fit all" mantra.
I haven't experienced a group where most edits are trivial, but within such a group, I imagine the people doing the trivial edits are primarily reading by web, without an appreciation for how their edits impact the members that read via email.
In its way this is comparable to the post-trimming conflict that crops up in some Y!Groups: members who read individual messages often don't appreciate the impact long trails of bottom quotes have on people trying to read by digest. The founder of Y!GMF, for example, wanted to solve that problem (and a host of others) by having a control which would allow him to disable posting by email in his groups. I, being primarily email oriented, have always been glad that Yahoo never saw fit to give him that option.
-- Shal
Shal Farley