From: D'Arcy J.M. Cain on
On Mon, 07 Jun 2010 11:02:21 +1000
Lie Ryan <lie.1296(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On 06/07/10 10:45, D'Arcy J.M. Cain wrote:
> > That's a great list of features. But they all apply to mailing lists as
> > well.
>
> I think Ben Finney was making comparison between Usenet/Mailing-List vs
> Forum. The argument basically sums up to Distributed vs. Centralized.

I don't know what Ben was thinking so I was just making it explicit.

> My only problem with mailing list is that for large lists, it can easily
> overflows my inbox. Having a separate interface (e.g. NNTP) is quite
> useful. For large list, I wouldn't be able to read all the posts anyway,
> so from time-to-time I'd "Mark Everything as Read", you cannot reliably
> do that in your Inbox even with filtering and all that stuffs.

It's trivial to filter into separate folders and trivial to empty a
folder. For me it's simply "^A" and "Del".

However, it would be nice to have an expire function so that messages
that I don't read for a specified time simply disappear. Do any email
clients do that?

--
D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy(a)druid.net> | Democracy is three wolves
http://www.druid.net/darcy/ | and a sheep voting on
+1 416 425 1212 (DoD#0082) (eNTP) | what's for dinner.
From: Ben Finney on
"D'Arcy J.M. Cain" <darcy(a)druid.net> writes:

> On Mon, 07 Jun 2010 11:02:21 +1000
> Lie Ryan <lie.1296(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > I think Ben Finney was making comparison between Usenet/Mailing-List
> > vs Forum. The argument basically sums up to Distributed vs.
> > Centralized.
>
> I don't know what Ben was thinking so I was just making it explicit.

You're right, D'Arcy. I don't know exactly what “much better interfaces
[than Usenet]” the poster was thinking of, that's why I listed some of
the features that Usenet has which I don't see improved on in other
interfaces.

Now it's up to those who think such features can be improved upon to
present a non-vapourware system that demonstrably has all of those
features or better.

--
\ “I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvelous to be ever |
`\ fascinated by the mere supernatural …” —Joseph Conrad, _The |
_o__) Shadow-Line_ |
Ben Finney
From: Aahz on
In article <87r5kj8zmk.fsf(a)benfinney.id.au>,
Ben Finney <ben+python(a)benfinney.id.au> wrote:
>
>So you say. For the interface to be "better" it needs to keep the good
>features of the existing interface. I include among the good features of
>Usenet:
>
> [...]

You skipped over the crowning glories of Usenet:

* Threaded messaging (more robust than mailing lists, generally speaking,
because the behavior of the References: header is better defined, and
References: includes more than just the immediate parent)

* Marking articles as read does *not* delete them; they are still
available for walking through the threading, but by default you never
see them again

NOTHING else has these, thirty years later.
--
Aahz (aahz(a)pythoncraft.com) <*> http://www.pythoncraft.com/

"If you don't know what your program is supposed to do, you'd better not
start writing it." --Dijkstra
From: python on
> However, it would be nice to have an expire function so that messages that I don't read for a specified time simply disappear. Do any email clients do that?

I use Fastmail.fm as my email service (and browser based email client).
Fastmail supports the ability to automatically delete messages > a
specific age on a folder by folder basis. Fastmail also supports a
variety of ways to file messages into folders - from simple to
sophisticated (Sieve based).

Highly recommended!

Malcolm