Attention, readers of the "comp.mail.multimedia" newsgroup and the
"mmm-people" internet mailing list:
As many of you know, the recent publication of MIME, the proposed
standard for multimedia Internet mail, has generated a great deal of
renewed interest in multimedia mail in general. Earlier today, I
proposed to readers of the MIME mailing list and the mailing list for
metamail (my public-domain MIME implementation) that we look into
creating new newsgroups for discussions of MIME and metamail.
Several people have suggested, in response, that the existing
comp.mail.multimedia newsgroup and mmm-people mailing list (which are
mutually gatewayed) are suitable for this purpose. What I would like to
know is this: do you think it would be reasonable to have general
discussions about MIME on mmm-people and comp.mail.multimedia? Or
would it be better to have aseparate newsgroup for this purpose? How
about specific MIME implementations such as metamail?
For information purposes, info-metamail routinely carries one or two
dozen messages a week at this point. The MIME dicussion list, ietf-822,
carries a much more variable amount of traffic, depending on the current
state of the standards process, but not all of this discussion would be
appropriate to move to mmm-people/comp.mail.multimedia anyway. In
particular, the mail oriented to new drafts of the MIME standard would
undoubtedly stay on ietf-822, while general "how does MIME do X?"
discussion would probably migrate to the newsgroup.
What is being suggested, at bottom, is a renewed and expanded charter
for this longstanding low-volume newsgroup. Alternately, we could
create new subgroups such as "comp.mail.multimedia.mime" and
"comp.mail.multimedia.metamail", thus not significantly increasing the
traffic on the base newsgroup. A hybrid strategy would be to start out
by just routing all such traffic to comp.mail.multimedia, and later
deciding if new groups are needed.
For myself, I have no strong opinions about which is the right solution;
I'm just trying to reduce the burden that is involved in administering
info-metamail, which has gotten to be a fairly large mailing list with
all the normal pains involved in such lists. A newsgroup seems like a
reasonable idea, but I don't much care whether we create a new one or
re-use an old one.
I suspect that it is better to debate this question publicly on the
list/newsgroup rather than via private mail to me, since I'm trying to
open a public discussion here rather than simply get person-to-person
advice.
Thanks for your patience & advice. -- Nathaniel