Re: mailing list vs "the futur"
On Fri, Aug 10, 2018 at 06:24:55AM -0400, Dan Ritter wrote:
> I get more mail than that before breakfast. If you've got the
> right tools, it's easy to deal with.
This is an excellent point. Many of the people who lodge complaints
like the one that started this discussion thread have chosen very poor
tools and thus have conflated the failings of those tools with some
non-existent inherent problems with mailing lists.
Serious email users should be using mutt, which is fast, compact,
resistant to attack, and has an astonishing number of features.
Those who receive large volumes of mail should be using procmail
to pre-sort it, and they should be aware of RFC 2919 (and thus
the existence of List-Id) as an excellent means for doing so.
These two tools in combination make dealing with large amounts
of traffic to large numbers of mailing lists quite easy.
Furthermore, everyone using mailing lists should be maintaining
their own archive, simply because there's no reason not to. The
storage required is small by contemporary standards and doing so
allows the use of local search tools (e.g., grepmail) which can
invaluable in locating relevant messages. (Those who haven't
been doing this can usually backfill by downloading the archives
maintained by the site running the mailing list. in turn, everyone
running a mailing list should take care to see that those archives
are fully accessible, unredacted, and downloadable on demand.)
---rsk
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