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Message-ID: <3C606B11.7060306@DeFaria.com>
Date: Tue, 05 Feb 2002 15:30:25 -0800
From: Andrew DeFaria <Andrew AT DeFaria DOT com>
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To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Why not a news server?
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    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.


News reading clients are a dime a dozen. Many, if not most, people 
already have them though may not be aware that they do.

    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.

In general, news was invented precisely for what this email based list 
is trying to do: Discuss stuff. The "limitations" you suggest did not 
stop companies like Netscape, Twelve Tone Systems, Microsoft, Spamcop 
and GRC from setting up news servers. Reading news is *NOT* that hard to do.

    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.

Lots of readers are jokes to some and serious tools to others. I, for 
example, think Outlook is a joke but it is used by a ton of people. Pick 
your favorite client. There are good ones.

    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.

Because I do not feel like having to pour though a ton of messages 
wasting space on my systems to weed out the junk and have to manage 
cleaning up all the stuff I'm not interested it. News servers were 
created exactly to address this issue. It is the medium developed 
exactly for what we are trying to do here. Am I so wrong to ask why we 
are not using the medium?!?.


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