Re: [Evolution] Re: Default change in 1.5?

["D. D. Brierton" <darren dzr-web com>]

On Thu, 2004-04-01 at 11:33, Michael Wever wrote:

> Use Pan for mailing lists or newsgroups. It's far superior than evolution
> in this respect and you don't get any of these problems.

Use PAN for mailing lists? How? Mailing lists use ... ermm ... mail.
*Some* mailing lists also get distributed as newsgroups (gnu.emacs.help,
for example) but I don't think most do and I'm petty sure the Ximian
ones don't.

Actually (OT now) why do open-source projects use mailing lists? Isn't
NNTP much better for discussions like this -- you can set up a
newsserver, say nntp.ximian.com, which only carries local groups, i.e.
ximian.evolution, ximian.evolution.patches, and which requires
authentication for access. Then instead of signing up for a mailing list
you simply sign up once for the newsserver. This would (a) cut down on
the possibility of spam being sent to the lists, (b) cut down on the
vast amount of email we all get, (c) make managing list discussions
easier (newsreaders have good facilities for killing threads or authors
you're not interested in, and for "catching up" (i.e. by marking
everything as read) when you've been away on holiday, etc). By keeping
the retention setting on the newsserver very high you would also have a
permanent archive of the discussions (a bit like the mailman web
archives) which you could access from within your newsreader simply by
toggling "view read messages".

IMHO whilst spam is the number one threat to the utility of email by a
long way, mailing lists are the number two threat. Most of us simply get
too much email. News/NNTP/usenet was invented for this kind of thing.
How come we don't use it?

Best, Darren

-- 
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D. D. Brierton            darren dzr-web com          www.dzr-web.com
       Trying is the first step towards failure (Homer Simpson)
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