[Mailman-Developers] Re: Future of pipermail?

[Chuq Von Rospach]

At 10:58 PM -0800 11/21/00, J C Lawrence wrote:

>I've spent considerable time thinking about this and believe it is
>to the lists' advantage in this case to hold firm.

you'll lose. AOL is the first to make this mandatory for their users, 
but users want these features. And besides, AOL is the 800 pound 
gorilla, and it's eating its lunch on your fence. Do you really think 
they're going to change back before your fence collapses under it?

AOL is too large to tell to go to hell if you're running general 
purpose lists. If you have a specialist audience, maybe -- but on my 
lists, AOL is generally 12-30% of my membership. That's a lot of 
cutting off of noses to spite the face.

>Aside: Less than 5% of my members are from AOL.  Less than 1% of my
>semi-regular posters are from AOL.  The impact here (for me) is
>quite small.

lucky you. you're not typical then, not given the size of AOL. But -- 
it's a losing battle, JC. AOL is the first. It won't be the only. My 
numbers show me that not only do ~90% of mail users have support for 
MIME email (stylized text, html, etc.), but most of them want to use 
it. And they don't like having to go through gyrations to avoid it -- 
and most have no clue how, and don't want to. So I think it's 
important that the server end deal with this rationally, because 
otherwise, you're fighting a constant battle of teaching users to 
placate the server, one user at a time. instead of teaching the 
server to deal with the users once. It turns into either a brick wall 
for users to bang their heads against and then give up and leave you 
-- or a huge support battle for you.

The war's over. there's a huge difference between keeping your web 
site accessible to Lynx users (a good thing!) and demanding users use 
lynx to access your site (a bad thing!). And now, not dealing with 
this rationally on the server is like telling everyone to use Lynx to 
read your web pages. It works if you have the right niche audience 
and/or have content they can't live without. But few people are in 
that kind of sellers market....

-- 
Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:chuqui@plaidworks.com)
Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:chuq@apple.com)

The vet said it was behavioral, but I prefer to think of it as genetic.
It cuts down on the liability -- Get Fuzzy