Suggestion: Replace List by Newsgroup

[Tim]

Tim:
>> 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.

Bill Davidsen:
> "that's also possible with decent mail clients,"

IMAP servers and clients are supposed to support it, but not all do.
Even those that do can be tedious about it.  On an IMAP server on a LAN,
I found it slower than NNTP through my ISP.  I suppose news software has
had years of practice at coding that well.

I've yet to find news servers and clients that don't do quick
header-only fetching, and quick fetching of the body upon demand.

>> 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).

> There is so much spam in email that this is a dubious claim.

Oh really???  For years I posted to usenet using an address something
like nothing at localhost (I can't recall exactly what I used).  There was
no way I could ever receive spam in my mail when I didn't expose a real
address to usenet.

-- 
[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.