El Sun, 13 Dec 2015 11:35:27 +0100, FRIGN escribió: > On Sun, 13 Dec 2015 10:29:02 +0000 (UTC)
> No, it's proof that you don't understand how to deal with IMAP. And > regarding size: My _entire_ suckless inbox which reaches back nearly two > years is only 68M, which is a joke. > I'm sure Google doesn't want to have 68M stored on their servers, so > that's why your inbox fills up. You don't want old mails to sync anyway, > so make backups or use POP3 for strict archiving, or run your own bloody > mailserver. :P > > Cheers > > FRIGN It is interesting to note that, often, when you don't like a certain tool as much as other person, the other person will automatically tell you that you don't know how to use it. I have my own email server and I also have inboxes with 10 GB of spare room. This does not deny the fact that you are the party filtering, storing, scheduling and organizing a lot of traffic your inbox gets regardless of how interested you are in each message. Regarding backups and archiving: * Reasonable email ways: 1) You use a pure POP3 client for reading your emails. If your connection is not good, you are in trouble, because you will be downloading lots of messages with a bad connection regardless of how interested you are in them. That means you will be downloading lots of messages you are not going to read under bad conditions. Not optimal. Definetively not an option if you are subscribed to many high traffic lists. 2) You use a pure IMAP client for reading the emails, you delete the ones you don't want, and you use POP3 or some syncing tool (including IMAP itself) for archiving to your workstation. It can be ok or not depending on how you handle it. * Typical NNTP way: - I use an NNTP client. I get a list of the new posts to the group, I click on the ones I want to read (which are saved to the computer on the fly) and mark everything else as read with a keyboard shortcut. This way is more or less like the previous 2) when done well, with the advantage of not depending on having to use an email account. Further considerations: - Mailing lists have multiple points of failure. If Alice and Bob are having a discussion on a mailing list, the conversation will be interrupted if any of the following events take place: ++ Alice's email provider goes down. ++ Bob's email provider goes down. ++ The mailing list service goes down. However, if Alice and Bob are having a discussion on a NNTP network, for the communication to be interrupted, every single node of that network must go down -although some messages could be lost or delayed if a significative part of the network went down at once. - The way you subscribe to a mailing lists is usually not standarized among mailing lists and requires you to craft one or two messages according to the mailing list instructions. A NNTP group has standarized subscription mechanisms that are the same across implementations and allow you to subscribe and unsubscribe with just one click. That means: subscribing to an NNTP group is less complex than subscribing to a mailing list. And yes, I have encountered mailing lists with bugs that messed the subscription and unsubscription processes. - NNTP networks automatically archive the conversations by design according to the policies of the operator, and make the archives available for public use. Mailing lists only do so when some cruft is added to the server to make it work that way. - Mailing lists usually draw a bullseye on your email address for spammers to practice their dark arts. - NNTP networks that don't require a registration are easy to spam away. The ones that require registration and user/password make the subscription step a bit more complex (as complex as, say, subscribing to a regular mailing list), but once you have a user/passwrod, you can subscribe to any group with one point-and-click each. CONCLUSSION: Mailing Lists are serviceable. I suspect email was not created to emulate forum-like communications, so that functionality had to be added over it. NNTP services seem to have been conceived to serve as forum-like communication and bulletin board like services straight from the begining and actually do much of the same. I don't think that switching from mailing list to NNTP makes sense from an admin point of view, if the solution in place is working. Gmane provides an NNTP interface to common mailing lists anyway. However, if I was setting a forum-like service for a community I were part off, I would consider NNTP first because of the marginal benefits.
