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Re: Code of Conduct on the Debian mailinglists




"Ben Pfaff" <blp@cs.stanford.edu> wrote in message [🔎] 87mzajj14x.fsf@benpfaff.org">news:[🔎] 87mzajj14x.fsf@benpfaff.org...
Magnus Holmgren <holmgren@lysator.liu.se> writes:


No problem at all.  Especially with gmane.org around.  I used to
subscribe to dozens of mailing lists, but now I can just browse
all of them as newsgroups.

I agree, I use Gmane for the same reason.

There are many problems with mailing lists. If email was intended to be threaded, a message ID would be manditory. It is actually optional. Email was designed for unidirectional or recipricating (back and forth replying to the last message) messages, not threaded conversation. This is why few UA's can handle threading well, and even the best UA will have problems with some messages.

Email was also definately not designed with mailing lists in mind. Multiple recipients, yes. That is why many MUA's have a "reply all" feature. But it was certainly not designed with what we think of as mailing lists in mind.

On the other hand, USENET is the oldest Internet service around that is still in relatively common use. It even predates what we know of as the Internet. It is designed for threaded content, and NNTP messages are closely related to rfc822 (and it successors) messages that tools like
spamassassin work just fine.

Not to mention with newsgroups it is easy to reply to messages sent before you subscribed, which can be a pain with mailing lists.

I am not aware of any common complaint about mewsgrousps that cannot be resolved simply by using a private (i.e. not syndicating) server
to host the groups.

So I really wonder why mailing lists are so common.

--
"The road to hell is paved with convenient shortcuts."
--Peter da Silva






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