After the recent discussion on the list of replacing bulk email with some
completely user-initiated protocol, such as RSS, I decided to try it out.
Mailbucket.org currently is testing its mailing list to RSS gateway, and
they allow subscription of any list for this purpose. The URL for the ASRG
list on this site is <http://www.mailbucket.org/asrg.xml>.
For the past few days, I've read the list in the RSS aggregator Liferea,
version 0.4.4. Here are my comments on this setup, which may not apply to
others:
1. The lack of inate threading is painful.
The messages simply appear as a sequence of messages, by default in date
order. The only other thing they can be sorted on is 'Headline', which leads
me to ...
2. Email headers aren't preserved.
The message subject is used as the headline of each item. Aside from the
subject, the gateway inserts the sender and date at the top of the message.
Even worse, it cuts off the sender's actual email address, so that only the
name appears, apparently to make it look nicer to the user.
3. There's no reasonable way to display the meaningful email headers.
In terms of looking at a list of posts, I suppose it could be reasonable to
insert the sender into the headline as well, but that would wreak havoc on
sorting by subject.
My conclusion is that NNTP is much better suited for this task. Mail clients
frequently have integrated newsreaders, netnews posts have headers analogous
to email's, and they interoperate well. The only real open question in terms
of mailing-list/news interoperability is submission: should it still be done
by emailing a list address, or should it be done by posting to the news
group directly?
--
Philip Miller
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