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Re: [Asrg] email pull (was RE: Authentication )

2003-03-26 12:33:14

On Wednesday, March 26, 2003, at 10:29  AM, Matt Sergeant wrote:

Q: Okay, what's the idea?
A: Add something RSS-like to email clients, where the client
occasionally (and infrequently) polls "subscribed" sites for new content

Hopefully Richard Bliss might not mind the credit for this idea going elsewhere... http://www.newsgator.com/ (and that's probably not the first implementation - just a very nice looking one).

It's not. Credit for RSS stuff probably circles back to Dave Winer, among others. But the blogs have taken RSS onto their own, and a bunch of folks are doing interesting things with RSS and that enables people to do nice things with RSS aggregators. it's just starting to peek over the horizon for most folks, but it's been building for a year or more. Fascinating stuff.

It helps mitigate one of my biggest gripes about the high volume discussion list, as well as enable people to keep an eye on what I call "2nd tier" lists -- the interruption of e-mail being a push technology, and the reality that most e-mail lists don't warrant being pushed into people's eyeballs. With RSS, people can choose to pull things on their schedule. Ultimately, I hope/expect the two technologies to merge to allow people to manage their information streams to their preferences.

I think it's an excellent idea, but not something we can force on list sources. It's also worth noting that it's only for one-way communication, so it doesn't help mailing lists.

Oh, sure it does. A bunch of us on the mailman dev lists hashed out this stuff months ago, and one of us (out of the foxhole, Lawrence) actually went an implemented a system that seems really pretty good. With Mailman as your email core, and web archives (based around MHonarc) and RSS, you have a nice distribution setup. He then grafted TDMA onto the front end, effectively whitelisting all of his mail lists. So on the return mail, you can either subscribe, or you can go through a challenge/response to get your message posted.

either way, no spam, no moderator intervention, and users don't have to go through the hassle of subscribing to post occasionally, especially if they read it via RSS or web. It was one of the things that started changing my mindset on whitelists, seeing how they could really enable open but secure communication channels without the increasingly bizarre "anti spam" restrictions us mail-list geeks have been coming up with to try to keep the spammers at bay. Using TDMA basically kills any chance of forged header mail getting through, so suddenly, your armed camp of a mail list doesn't need all that barbed wire any more.

there was some talk of adding these features to Mailman down the road, but it's still in talk stage. But he's got it up and running, and it works, and one of these days, I plan on going down that same path. It really shows what whitelists can do once you get over the "how dare you ask ME for ID?" mental state -- and yes, it took me a while to get over it, too... But once I did, I realized whitelists could make various aspects of life much easier on all side, especially compared to fuzzy gif schemes and all that other stuff.

Lawrence, want to explain your stuff in more detail and point people at where they can find out more?


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