I am only half-surprised at the reaction to
AOL's plan to cut down on incoming email traffic
by using their "local distribution" news groups
to house mailing list traffic for their readers.
For while I am surprised that people didn't
understand O'Donnell's point right off the bat,
I CAN understand the reservations one would have
about assurances from AOL that it would be
"done right". (It didn't help to wave the red
flag of USENET NEWSGROUPS).
Just last week, the Rolling Stones
list 'Undercover' was hit with about a half-dozen
messages on everything from Exabyte tape drives,
to a way to substitute for 'WHERE' clauses using
Paradox for Windows. The source of this was
a site run by inexperienced people who were trying
to work out some email<-->USENET gateway solution.
Apparently, all their regular outgoing USENET traffic,
regardless of topic, came on to our list, including
a one-word message saying "test" (How Yoko-esque!)
(The site's admin, he of the ten-line .sig, told the
Undercover admin that he was 'lucky' that someone
was onsite who knew what he was doing, and could
put a stop to the problem).
At the "official" machine on campus here, where all
students, staff, and faculty get their Internet access,
the VMS software BULLETIN was installed to house incoming
email list traffic. One really wonderful feature of this,
which I don't think has been mentioned, is that unlike
NEWS, where, once you discover a group of likely
interest, you can scan many articles covering weeks'
worth of traffic for tone and content, mailing lists
usually do not offer this advantage. You sign up for
a list, and it may be quite some time before you get an
idea of what things are like, particularly on a slow list.
Availability of a bunch of traffic may "calm down"
newbies a bit, and O'Donnell is right - it is a very good solution
to the invasion of subscriptions with week-long lifespans.
I would also point out that for lists whose traffic
and content one might not want to have their email
address associated with on a remote machine, but which
one would still like to read, setups like this provide
an opportunity to for these hyper-paranoid types to access
list traffic via their newsreader, unsubbing to the
'group' when off, and staying calm.
As has been wisely pointed out here, lists are less rigid in
style and approach than USENET groups, where you basically
have only moderated and unmoderated. Lists lead rich
and varied lifestyles, and my only concern is that the
functionality of an off-the-shelf newsreader, a subset
of the functionality of an ideal, full-featured list reader,
will create problems for both AOL admins, and list admins.
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|Tony Rzepela |<rzepela@cvi.hahnemann.edu>| |
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