"Dotan Cohen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On 29/11/2007, Dennis Lee Bieber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Regardless of what Google/Yahoo/M$/AOL want you to think, > > using a web-based mail client is typically the worst way to follow > > mailing lists and/or news-groups; much better to use a decent > > client program that can download posts in the background, then > > sort/thread/filter them as desired. > > With the exception of Gmail. I really could not follow 20+ high > volume lists (such as Python, PHP, Fedora, MySQL, OOo, and some > other very high traffic lists) without Gmail.
I'm not interested in learning some centralised web-application interface, and far prefer the discussion forum to be available by a standard *protocol*, that I can use my choice of *local client* application with. Most of the high-volume discussion lists I participate in are made available as NNTP forums via news.gmane.org. I find that immeasurably superior to any email interface, not least because I can use *any* NNTP client to manage my interaction with those forums. The metaphor of discussion-forum-as-NNTP-newsgroup is, for my purposes, far superior to discussion-forum-as-mailing-list. For those forums only available as mailing lists, I find them much more awkward to manage. The proliferation of "web forums", where the *only* way to participate is to use an excreable web application that works differently to everything else and has no connection to anything else I do on my computer, is of course utterly antithesis to my needs. I would, of course, welcome an increase in the number of discussion forums made available as NNTP groups, whether via Gmane or any other service — including the same people who host the mailing list (or, gods forbid, "web forum"). -- \ "Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best | `\ way to predict the future is to invent it." -- Alan Kay | _o__) | Ben Finney -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
