Re: mailing list vs "the futur"
On Fri, Aug 10, 2018 at 07:06:11AM -0400, Rich Kulawiec wrote:
> 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,
pre-sorting is essential but dang, procmail drove me crazy for a few
years (so slow, clunky rules, ugh!) and I finally tore into sieve
like a carnivore! Damn that felt good.
Oh, and batching the downloads with getmail (and the every friendly
Osamu pipes up on this list) or mpop - both a blindingly fast
compared to anything and everything else including TBird! for a
decade I've NEVER looked back.
And batching the sieve sorting too - not only are sieve rules a
breath of fresh air compared to procmail, it's essentially instant to
sort your "temp email download mail box" into their destination
folders (since the rules are only "compiled" once), and for the big
FTW win, give yourself a little summary output too (see attached and
very hackish script).
Last step is I need to migrate off of Gnu sieve and onto the other
one (Dovecot perhaps?) since Gnu sieve is a pompous prig which spits
the occasional "Malformed email address" - hey, perhaps it's more
secure, IDK, but the attached script even color highlights the
leftover emails from your temp download folder. Did I mention FTW?
> 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
Ack!
Once I'm subbed to a list, I simply never delete the emails (except
the occasional spam which squeaks through e.g. Debian's lists - but
it really is occasional - and for very lazy personal email spam
protection - just use the big G's email).
> 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.)
I've used forums when no ML was available, and damn it's frustrating
- email is inherently a batch process, which is most efficient of my
time especially in the face of boondocks-class (slow) internet
connections, offline thread viewing, greppability, threads read
trackability (I can trivially see what I have and have not read yet,
and keep not reading those things I want to read later, etc) etc.
Literally nothing else compares to a comfortable offline email
setup... good luck all,
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