[Coco] CoCoList and the Web, was Re: CoCoList Survey on email but no web browser access CoCo users.

[Gene Heskett]

On Wednesday 22 April 2009, John W. Linville wrote:
>On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 07:06:55PM -0500, Roger Taylor wrote:
>> At 12:57 PM 4/22/2009, you wrote:
>>> On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 11:59:27AM -0500, Sean wrote:
>>> > Mailing lists are good for current discussions, but forums are much
>>> > better for archiving info or being able to search for specific topics.
>>>
>>> * Citation needed *
>>
>> http://www.google.com/search?q=color+computer+forum
>
>Congratulations!  Google can find your website...so?
>
>>> If anything, I find web forums to be _much_ more _difficult_ to search
>>> for specific topics.
>>
>> http://www.google.com/search?q=color+computer+forum+nitros-9
>
>Setting aside whether or not "nitros-9" is a _specific_ topic...
>
>All that does is point me at your forum.  It doesn't prevent me
>from having to click through it or deal with its awkward interface.
>And if I wanted a local copy of the information, I either need to cut &
>paste to an editor or I need to mirror your website (which also could
>change on a whim).
>
>For comparison:
>
>	http://five.pairlist.net/pipermail/coco/2009-April/thread.html
>
>Of course, that still completely misses the point.  I don't want to
>have to use a web interface _at_all_.  The email comes to me, and if
>I think it will be interesting in the future then I don't delete it.
>When I want to search for something, it is probably in my mail
>folder already.  And if not, Dennis/Mailman has it waiting for me.
>
>John
>
>P.S.  Couldn't leave "specific topic" alone...
>
>	http://www.google.com/search?q=color+computer+superboard

Neither could I john.  First, I do NOT expire this list, ever, but due to a 
drive crash in early 2002, my corpus of email from this list starts then and 
with maybe 20 exceptions, every msg since then is sitting here for me to 
consult should I be of a mind to.  Other than my inbox, this is the only non-
expired mailbox I keep here and the list of lists I'm on in the left pane of 
kmail is about 3" higher than my 1680x1050 screen.  Email comes to me, from 3 
accounts on 3 servers, absolutely and totally automatically via some scripts I 
wrote years ago that drive fetchmail, which in turn uses procmail as the local 
MTA (Mail Transfer Agent), and procmail runs it all through spamassassin for 
labeling.  I long ago gave up caring about false positives, so now when the 
mail comes back from SA with an 'X-Spam-Level' line with 5 or more '*' in it, 
procmail sends it on to /dev/null & I never see it, true for around 2000 a 
week.  That leaves me with maybe 8 to 12 spams it didn't catch each day, which 
I drop into the spam directory with one drag-n-drop, and about 10am in the 
morning another script will feed all those to sa-learn -spam and then delete 
them.

So ALL I have to do is sit here, and hit the + key to read the next message 
and reply if I am so moved.  There is simply no way that webmail (that has to 
be navigated to and then logged into) will ever be that simple and convenient, 
nor is a 'forum' that has to be logged into just as if it was webmail.  
Fetchmail takes care of all that stuff every 90 seconds, which is probably at 
least 50 times faster than I could do it by hand.  Kmail scans the box 
procmail dumps into every 2 minutes and sorts it to the appropriate folder 
here, and all I see is a bold faced number of new mails showing up adjacent to 
the folders name.  Send me an email, and the maximum possible time lag between
it hitting the server at vz and my seeing it here is 3:30.  The last time I 
logged into my mailbox at vz was several months ago & probably took me 5 
minutes to get in cuz I had to look up all the passwords to get there.  And 
then I had to keep hitting F5 to refresh my view.

That doesn't describe anything I'd call convenience compared to reading this 
mailing list already sorted into the 'coco' folder.  Using convenience and 
webmail in the same sentence is an oxymoron comparable to military 
intelligence.

Simply said, this mailing list Just Works(TM).

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
I am what you will be; I was what you are.