Suggestion: Replace List by Newsgroup

[Tim]

On Fri, 2011-02-11 at 22:11 +0100, Outway wrote:
> I don't see in what way a mailing list is superior to a newsgroup. But I
> do see several advantages of a newsgroup:
> 
> * Clear thread structure (collapsable trees in standard news readers)

Well, actually, that's also possible with decent mail clients.  Crappy
ones can't, and postings from crappy ones disrupt the threading for
everyone else (for news and email).

You didn't mention bandwidth saving:  You download a list of headers, of
what's become available since your last look, but you only download the
actual body of message when you go to read it.  i.e. If there's 2,000
messages one day, and you only want to read 2 of them, they're the only
ones you'd fetch.

Nor:  Never receive spam in your personal mail, since you don't have to
expose your email address when posting to a news server.  Some servers
will accept no address, others insist on one (but you can use a
blackhole address that you don't check for mail).

> A newsgroup is no more complicated to set up from a reader point of view
> than mailing list access. No exotic software is needed, the newsgroup
> can also be web interfaced.

In the past it could be a bit of a pain, if you found that you needed to
go to more than one news server for all of your groups.  But more
clients are around that handle multiple news servers, and quite well.

In general, I have preferred news to mailing lists, though it's been a
long while since I bothered.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.  I
read messages from the public lists.