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