On Thu, Oct 22, 2015 at 11:02:00AM -0400, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
Mailing lists are a broken technology. [big snip]
I disagree in part and agree in part. Mailing lists are still massively
useful and *clearly* superior, by a huge margin, to things like web-based
message boards. I'll go so far as to say that no organization or project
can be taken seriously unless it supports at least one mailing list
for announcements and/or communication. On the other hand, mailing lists
have (recently) taken a beating thanks to the ill-advised deployment
of incompatible technology (like DMARC) by some major email providers.
Ironically, the very same email providers which have allegedly done
this to prevent email abuse are systemic and chronic *sources* of
email abuse AND are among the very worst about fielding complaints
and acting on them in a timely, efficient, comprehensive manner.
Thus while I agree in part with you, I would argue that it's not
mailing lists which are broken, per se, it's some very large email
operations that are broken, thanks to incompetence and negligence,
salted liberally with arrogance.
On the other hand, while mailing lists scale well -- to a point -- they
do not scale as well as Usenet news:
We used to have a system of that type, it was called NNTP.
There are methods (supported by Mailman, incidentally) that allow
bidirectional gatewaying between mailing lists and newsgroups.
The Python language folks have been using that for years, and while
it's not without its occasional issues, it seems to work quite well.
(I've been monitoring both the SMTP- and NNTP-delivered versions
and comparing them.)
Is that kind of gatewaying something that might be appropriate
for the IETF's lists?
---rsk