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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