[plug] Re: mail-list vs news

[Bernd Felsche]

On Saturday 11 September 2004 12:37, Michael Holland wrote:
> On Sat, 11 Sep 2004, Bernd Felsche wrote:
> > You only have to download articles which you find "interesting".

> I don't think that's an issue for many people any more. But if you
> do have bandwidth problems, e.g. using GSM-data, you can acheive
> the same thing with e-mail using IMAP.

Which works how if you're running your own mail server?

The bandwidth I do have (dialup; 250 megabyte/month quota) has
inherent priorities. Cluttering up a mailbox with a hundred PLUG,
and hundreds of other mailing list articles every day can obscure
and divert from important communications.

Sure; I can use email filters to keep filing stuff away into
corresponding folders until I have time to read them; but after a
while, I have a backlog of a thousand unread messages per mailing
list... and I end up reading almost none of them. I have to manually
delete the ones I don't want to keep.

With news, you can save just what you want to keep.

And what happens if I have to go away at short notice with mailing
list subscriptions? I have to tediously set each and every one to
"no mail" or unsubscribe to avoid ending up with 28,000 unread
messages after 2 months.

With news, I simply don't poll the server while I'm away. When I
return, I can catch up on the last few hundred messages or the last
week's messages in each newsgroup.

-- 
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