[plug] Re: mail-list vs news

[Bernd Felsche]

On Saturday 11 September 2004 13:35, James Devenish wrote:
> In message <1094876125.10641.7.camel at rattus.Localdomain>

> on Sat, Sep 11, 2004 at 12:15:25PM +0800, William Kenworthy wrote:
> > I like to scan the text of every email: newsgroups dont allow that to
> > happen easily

> No one's proposing that the e-mail list would be replaced by a newsgroup
> are they?? (Also, I'm not really sure that there's a problem here: don't

Certainly not. Merely an alternative method of access.

A mailing list for "must see" announcements is a good idea. 
A mailing list of general discussions between hundreds, if not
thousands of subscribers can rapidly overwhelm.

> people with offline readers slurp all the message bodies anyway?)

Not necessarily. Leafnode even provides a "delay-body" feature so
that attemtping to view the message will cause a subsequent fetch of
the artcile body from the server.

> > I like to keep email around, not have it dissappear at some undefined
> > point a couple of days later

> If you were reading from a newsgroup, you would save messages that
> you wanted to save, and not save messages that you didn't want to
> save. If you want to save all messages, then that's fine too.
> Also, I think the issue of whether we'd have messages disappear is
> debatable.

There'd still be the online archives. Heck; the archives and the
news server *could* be the same repository.

> > Too much spam, crap, irrelevance and just plain bad manners, as well
> > as not fitting the way I like to read my information.

> I think you're thinking of USENET. I had thought we'd previously been
> thinking of a PLUG news server rather than USENET, but I don't know
> what everyone else was really thinking.

PLUG news server was what I was thinking. With the possibility of
authentication if necessary to keep out the scum.

-- 
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