On Mon, 2 Jun 1997, Leslie Mikesell wrote:
> However, I don't quite understand why we need mailing list software
> if User Agents are supposed to do everything by themselves. Why
> not make all user agents capable of obtaining the envelope address
> list and expanding it themselves instead of submitting through
> software that understands the concept of discussion lists and
> processes it accordingly?
Partly to preserve privacy. Only the central list server knows all the
subscriber addresses. Subscribers can collect the addresses of other
subscribers who post, but not the addresses of lurkers.
It would actually make a fair bit of sense though now that the
WWW/HTML/etc libs are bidirectional all types to all types (or heading
that way) to have a new type of email address which is directly a pointer
to a list URL instead of to a list server's mailbox. Probably it still
would not be the user agent but rather the transport agent that would
actually grab the list from the specified URL and do the actual
transporting.
So yes you are right, the state of the art of remotely accessible files is
now at a point where the user's nearest transport agent, or even the user
agent, could reasonably access a list that is shared in live in real time
with all other subscribers. Mailing lists date back to earlier tech; but
also allow more restrictions to be placed upon using the subscriber list
than simple network file sharing offers.
Blessed Be. -MarkM-
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