Re: mailing list vs "the futur"
On Wednesday 29 August 2018 03:33:16 tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 08:28:56PM -0400, Miles Fidelman wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> > Last time I looked, Thunderbird & Exchange both support news - a
> > newsgroup looks just like another email account.
>
> And Gnus. That's exactly the point all those "yay, modern, shiny"
> folks don't "get":
>
> SMTP, NNTP and IMAP are abstract (and relatively
> stable) interfaces which allow the development of a bunch of different
> clients which suit a hugely diverse user base, even as weird folks
> as me. User is queen: GOOD
>
> On a "web forum", me, the user, gotta put up with whatever dorky
> "web GUI" some random "startup" has come up with. And they often are
> dorky for a reason, the provider is basing its business model on
> this (branding, embedding ads, sucking up data, you name it). There's
> often a "REST interface", but it is at a much lower abstraction level
> as SMTP et al -- and it is a moving target: often, the server and
> client parts are in one repository, tied by a framework. You can
> change the interface spec at a whim, since the browser downloads the
> new client code. That means that me, as a user have to put up with
> whatever cruel abomination the provider has thought up for me.
> Provider is king: BAD.
>
> That's at least my take on it. It isn't something we all are going
> to agree on, as in the GPL vs BSD/MIT thing -- your opinion will
> depend on which side you lean towards (my "good"/"bad" above reflect
> my personal leanings, shouldn't you have noticed :-)
>
> Cheers
> -- tomás
Which is why, in this age of feeding 100 megs of advertising to the
browser client before allowing the materiel clicked on to be displayed,
often in a smaller more space efficient font that has you expanding your
right hands reach to hit the ctrl+ + keys to expand it to easily read,
this obnoxious old fart still pulls his email with fetchmail, which
hands it off to procmail which then runs it past clamav and spamassassin
and a few of its own recipes that end in /dev/null, and what survives is
written to /var/spool/mail/gene. And /var/spool/mail is watched by
inotifywait launched by a bash script I wrote called mailwatcher which
when inotifywait exits with the name of the file just closed by
procmail, sends the tde version of kmail a "get mail" message over dbus
and fires up inotifywait to do it all over again with the next incoming
message. That reduces the work I have to do to a tap of the + key to
read the next message, reply to it if I can help or comment as in now,
and when done adding my voice to the thread, a ctrl + RETURN sends my
prose back to the list. And a tap on the + key takes me to the next
unread message.
Thats all about 10x easier than launching a ^@& browser, logging into
the mail server and reading the crap presented, in the order of arrivasl
there. But because 99% of my ISP's users use IMAP, my ISP has disabled
fetchmails ability to delete a successfully pulled email, I still need
to log in daily and delete the crap by hand to reduce my exposure to
whatever email harvesting bull crap they may do. Its not a perfect
solution, but it beats webmail like a white mouthed mule when the + key
is hit 500x a day.
So I'm an obnoxious old fart, show me an even better way, if you can.
Computers are supposed to do work FOR the user, not the other way around
by creating circuitous ways past the ticket taker.
--
Cheers, Gene Heskett
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
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