Finally had to plonk google gorups.

[Michael Torrie]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 11:49 AM, Mike Driscoll <kyosohma at gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't think I like the email list idea all that much. I'm already on
> a number of them and they fill up my box like crazy. Besides that, in
> email format it's hard to follow the thread, so one moment I'm reading
> about the latest ding dong and the next is a response to a post from
> last week.

Using a good client like Thunderbird, and e-mails thread just fine.
Nesting as deep as need be.  On my client (I use thunderbird for
everything), it looks the same whether I use NNTP or mailing lists.
It's all good.

As for filling up your inbox, that never happens to me.  My inbox gets
maybe 1 new message a day.  Everything else is automatically filed
into the right folder, just like how NNTP shows you individual groups.
 Gmail makes this very easy to do with their filters.  For others
there is procmail.  Honestly a few minutes of work is very much worth
it.  For those that want to keep using nntp and put up with the spam
(no server-side spam processing there), that's great, though.

Finally as for threading being difficult, yes it is if you use GMail's
web client.  "Conversations" are *not* threads, sadly.  It's a broken
interface that's becoming popular unfortunately.  I've always hated
web forums for the same reasons.  Conversations also don't deal very
well with changes in the subject line that reflect new directions or
forks in the current topic.

> But I agree...there are other alternatives. I'll have to start trying
> them again I suppose.

If I have to, I guess.  :)