[Subject changed as per posting guidelines. Mod.]
Philip Miller wrote:
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
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg
-------
Yakov Shafranovich / asrg <at> shaftek.org
SolidMatrix Technologies, Inc. / research <at> solidmatrix.com
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" (Lord
Acton)
-------
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg