At 10:05 AM -0500 3/23/03, mathew wrote:
On Saturday, Mar 22, 2003, at 13:50 US/Eastern, Kee Hinckley wrote:
At 1:02 PM -0500 3/22/03, Damien Morton wrote:
At any rate, I tend to think that mailing lists are better handled using
NNTP.
There are plent of reasons not to use NNTP for mailing lists.
Privacy, spam control and member control come immediately to mind.
You know that authentication via NNTP is possible, right?
Ah. I understand. You're talking about the owner of the mailing
list running an NNTP server, as opposed to actually using Usenet.
Okay, that makes more sense. Yes, I wish that were more common. Of
course it seriously increases the cost of running a list. You need
to have an always up machine with some amount of fixed storage. And
we need better newsreaders that make it easier to download new
messages for off-line reading.
If NNTP was the accepted way to do group discussions, you'd soon see
yahoogroups and other discussion forum services offering NNTP. (Not
sure why they don't already.)
I have never understood the resistance to using newsgroups. Yet
customers choose web boards (which I despise) over them every time.
I think it's just a question of what people are used to. The came to
the internet via the web and then discovered email (or vice versa).
Now you want to introduce a third piece of software, and they've
already got something that manages to do solve the problem so-so.
They don't want to learn something new that is custom designed to
deal with this problem, but isn't (general rule of thumb) an order of
magnitude better.
I think there's a lesson there for people who want to replace email
with something better. Inertia is a real powerful force.
--
Kee Hinckley
http://www.puremessaging.com/ Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/ Writings on Technology and Society
I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
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