Fw: Why not a news server?

["Greg Mosier" <Greg dot Mosier at USA dot Net>]

> From: "Andrew DeFaria" <ADeFaria@Salira.com>
> Subject: Why not a news server?
>
> Why not simply set up a news server instead of this mail list. I find
> the mail list deficient in several areas. First and foremost it's noisy
> causing me to wade through all this email for topics I'm interested in.
> Secondly there's no easy or convenient way to response to individual
> issues (I get a digest of cygwin stuff emailed to me). Seems to me that
> nntp was designed specifically for such communications and a number of
> companies have set up news servers for such things.
>
> Finally a number of times I receive a digest speaking of topics and
> articles but the email message is apparently truncated and the bodies of
> these articles are missing.
>
> Comments? (I'm sure there will be some).

You ask why not?  Let me answer that with a question.  How many people do
you know that have a news reader but don't have an email client?  Chances
are that it's slim to none while on the other hand you'll have a great
number of people that don't have a news reader but do have email.  Using a
news server for something that people aren't forced to use will limit your
subscriber base simply because there are those, such as myself, that just
don't have the time to fool with finding a good reader, learn it, and then
use it accordingly. As they say, two heads are better than one, but when you
start using a format that
is foreign to a majority of the internet masses you're going to start
limiting your creative pool.  Just to belay the comments on this, no one
needs to suggest that Outlook Express comes with a news reader because I've
toyed with it, and from my experience and from what I've been told by
others, it's a joke of a reader.

As for your issue with corrupted messages, why not just switch to regular
delivery and setup your mail client to move all messages from this list into
a folder of it's own?  A good email client will even sort email messages
based on subject similar to that of the method a news server stores
messages.  It's just my opinion, but as far as I can see the only real
advantage to using 'news' instead of a listserv is that you're not wasting
bandwidth on people that aren't even reading the list.

Regards,
Greg Mosier




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