Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site cbosgd.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!mark From: mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) Newsgroups: net.news Subject: Re: mailing lists are no substitute for newsgroups; let idle ones be! Message-ID: <926@cbosgd.UUCP> Date: Tue, 5-Mar-85 17:28:15 EST Article-I.D.: cbosgd.926 Posted: Tue Mar 5 17:28:15 1985 Date-Received: Wed, 6-Mar-85 05:15:19 EST References: <4351@Glacier.ARPA> <145@osu-eddie.UUCP> Organization: Bell Labs, Columbus Lines: 59 I have to agree with Brian and disagree with Karl on this one. I've also used lots of mailing lists and newsgroups over many years. My experience is that, while mailing list maintainers try to be good about it (as clearly Karl does) things don't always work out so well in practice. To subscribe to a newsgroup, you edit your .newsrc (or if you subscribe to everything, you automatically get it and do nothing.) This takes perhaps 2 minutes. You immediately have access to 2 weeks of back issues. To subscribe to a mailing list, you send mail to the list owner. This first implies knowing about the list and who the list owner is, which is nontrivial. Then you send mail to the list owner. If the mail gets there OK (this implies you found a working route in the UUCP world) and the list owner is responsive, you may be on the list within a day or so. However, it's not uncommon for the request to be dropped on the floor by the mail system or the list owner, or for the list owner not to know how to get mail back to you, or for a delay of a week or more to occur. Then you typically don't have access to back issues (unless you're on the ARPANET and have somehow found out about a place you can FTP them from.) Mailing lists also intrude on your time more than netnews. You get that "you have new mail" announcement and have no idea if it's something important from a coworker or the latest issue of sf-lovers. Once you go into mail to find out, you generally figure you might as well read it. Netnews comes in via a different channel than mail, so you tend to only start it up when you have a little time on your hands. (There are those on the ARPANET who dismis this argument, pointing out that they can have their mass-mailings sent to a different login name, and that they have some wonderful mail interface that understands how to reply to digests and do different sorts of replies to the author or to the group. To them I must point out that very few people have the power to create alternate mailboxes for themselves, and many operating systems, such as System V, just can't do it. In practice, almost nobody uses such features.) Finally, when a mailing list breaks, because a machine or link is down, or a person changes their address, the error message (complete with a copy of the original posting) was designed for the case where the mailing list is small and it's important that the posting get to everyone, so it returns the error to the sender. This person usually can't do anything about it, so he just throws the message away. There are a few mailing lists that have provisions for returning the errors to the owner of the list, but the way to do this isn't universally agreed upon, and most mailing lists don't do it. I know that if I send a piece of mail to any large mailing list (such as namedroppers) I'll get back 3 to 5 warnings from some mailer that it's been a day and my mail hasn't gotten through to somebody at some machine that's down, and a few days later when some of these machines are still down, I get another copy telling me it's been thrown away. We use mailing lists a lot, but for different sorts of things than public discussions ala netnews. We use them for internal things within my project at Bell Labs, for example, we have a mailing list for everyone in my group, and one for everyone in the department. There are several mailing lists used for the UUCP project. I also belong to a few ARPA mailing lists that aren't gatewayed into Usenet. However, traffic on these lists is pretty light, and most of them are intended for private discussions and announcements. If you're conducting any sort of a public discussion where anyone can join in, I prefer to use a newsgroup. Mark